A preclinical platform for focused ultrasound delivery from microplate to awake brain

Awake stereotaxic pulsed low-intensity focused ultrasound (pLIFU) in GL261-bearing mice attenuates acute tumor bioluminescence signal by a mean log2 fold-change of -1.66 versus +5.20 controls (p = 0.016).

• Why it matters: Focused ultrasound has therapeutic promise, but preclinical studies are limited by fragmented benchtop setups that hinder standardized acoustic exposure across models.
• What they did: The authors built a unified lightweight platform enabling single-well microplate, single-well ex vivo human glioblastoma, and stereotaxic transcranial delivery to awake, head-fixed mice; output was independently calibrated in free field with measured microplate insertion loss.
• The result: In ex vivo human glioblastoma, pLIFU shifted immunophenotypes toward increased iNOS+ and decreased Arg1+ populations, and in RAW 264.7 and THP-1 cells reduced CD80 to 73% and 64% of baseline, respectively.

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