Exciting new treatment being developed for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s

April 30, 2026

By Tristan Horrom
VA Research Communications

VA researchers have discovered a way to flush unwanted proteins and waste products from the brain by using inhaled puffs of specific amounts of carbon dioxide at set intervals, providing a low-impact, easy-to-administer breathing treatment for patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease.

Led by Dr. Henry C. Lin, the New Mexico VA Health Care System team, which included Lin’s research mentees Drs. Sephira Ryman and Andrei Vakhtin, are currently working with VA’s Technology Transfer Program (TTP) to develop a prototype device that can be distributed to administer the breathing treatment for Veterans on a wide scale.

“It becomes a moment of tremendous hope,” said Dr. Lin on the potential of the new treatment, “because these are truly terrifying diseases with no solution right now. Imagine how wonderful it would be to have a new way to help these patients.”

Cases of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have increased exponentially in recent years, with millions of people in the United States having one of these conditions. A unifying feature of neurodegenerative conditions is the accumulation of unwanted proteins in the brain. For Alzheimer’s disease it is amyloid beta and Tau proteins, while for Parkinson’s disease it is alpha synuclein. Related conditions such as Lewy body dementia have a similar protein buildup.

Normally, the body can clear these proteins, which are often the waste products of neuron activity, using a natural process called glymphatic clearance, which takes place when our bodies enter deep sleep. During this process, the brain tells cerebral blood vessels to dilate and constrict, which allows the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain to flow deeper into the tissue as interstitial fluid. A cycle of blood vessel dilation and contraction pumps the interstitial fluid through the brain and then back out, flushing potentially harmful proteins, inflammatory mediators, and waste into the blood so the body can clear them out. This process takes place at night, when it will not impact more complex synaptic function, which is also when the brain’s neurons dump out their waste products. Indeed, many scientists believe glymphatic clearance is one of the reasons we need to sleep in the first place.

However, people with neurodegenerative conditions frequently have sleep disorders, while people with sleep disorders are at greater risk of neurodegenerative disorders. This vicious circle impairs the ability of the body to initiate glymphatic clearance.

In their groundbreaking work, Drs. Lin, Vahktin, and Ryman discovered how to trigger the glymphatic clearance process on command.

In their study, conducted with 30 patients with Parkinson’s disease and 33 healthy controls, they used MRI brain scans during sleep to figure out the frequency of oscillation between blood vessel dilation and contraction during glymphatic clearance. They then had study participants breathe in a mixture of 5% carbon dioxide and normal air, alternating with normal room air every 35-seconds.

After just one half-hour session of the new treatment, the researchers detected higher concentrations of proteins such as beta amyloid, alpha synclein, and other byproducts of brain activity in the blood, indicating these waste products had been flushed out of the brain and into the blood, allowing the body to clear them. The best thing about the new technique is how simple it is, according to Dr. Lin.

“We were just blown away that a single session of 30 minutes, with our subjects feeling no symptoms, was able to get the stuff out of the brain and into circulation to be cleared by the liver and kidneys,” explained Dr. Lin. “It just leaves me with a lot of optimism for what’s possible.”

The idea came from Dr. Lin’s early training as a medical student. While a student, he was taught that when a patient comes in with head trauma, you should hyperventilate them to lower the arterial CO₂ because a lower blood CO₂ concentration will contract the blood vessels within the brain and reduce the pressure inside the skull, giving the patient a few precious minutes for more direct treatment to be administered.

If lowering the CO₂ levels in blood constricts the vessels in the brain, the opposite could also be true. Increasing CO₂ levels could cause the vessels to dilate, and alternating raising and lowering the CO₂ level would generate the pumping action needed to propel the interstitial fluid across the brain.

This brain flush technique also has the potential to be much safer than existing treatments. Currently the best available treatment for the harmful protein accumulation associated with Alzheimer’s disease uses monoclonal antibodies to target one type of protein fragment. Since that approach is only 27% to 32% effective at slowing cognitive decline over 18 months, even state-of-the-art monoclonal antibody therapy is only used to delay when someone with Alzheimer’s disease would need to go into memory care. Furthermore, monoclonal antibody therapy comes with potentially dangerous risks, such as serious brain swelling and bleeds.

The new CO₂ treatment, on the other hand, seems to have very few side effects. According to Dr. Lin, safety is built right into the technique because the patient always has access to normal room air every 35 seconds while receiving CO₂ concentration of only 5% in between, which poses little risk.

Currently, TTP is helping the researchers patent the technology, and its Technology Transfer Assistance Program (TTAP) is building a prototype. Engineers with TTAP in Cleveland, led by program manager Stephanie Bailey, are working on building a control system that will allow control of the timing of CO₂ delivery.

Bailey expects the first prototype to be ready later this year. She explained how the design process involves back and forth communication between the researchers and engineers on technical specifications and needs, resulting in a collaboration of different expertise. Since Dr. Lin and other VA employees who may have an invention idea to help Veterans are usually clinicians without engineering experience, having TTAP as a resource is a major boon to developing their ideas.

“VA is incredible for providing resources that many people don’t even realize exist,” said Dr. Lin. “The engineering corps has been constituted to do exactly this, to bring discoveries to the people of America. Our VA system has that mission and then has invested in this program so there’s an engineering corps ready to take discoveries to the next step. I mean, that’s a wonderful thing.”

The first prototype will be for continued research work. The engineering team is mostly focused on the control box to help simplify the process and make it easier to administer. Part of their work involves figuring out what existing technology can be used, such as breathing masks similar to CPAP machines and gas delivery systems already in hospitals, rather than reinventing the wheel from scratch.

Once TTAP gets the prototype into the researchers’ hands, more testing will ensue before the project is turned back over to TTP for further development and potential licensing. TTP’s mission is to facilitate the commercialization of VA inventions to benefit Veterans and the American public. They accomplish this mission by licensing VA inventions to outside companies that have the infrastructure to develop the technology and bring it to market. This process can help translate new treatments and technology to clinical care faster than if they were being developed in a vacuum.

“Part of the reason I like this job,” explained Bailey, “is when we do these projects, especially when you meet passionate people like Dr. Lin, it allows you to discover ideas you never knew existed. It’s a strength of the VA system that it can be more responsive for getting new innovations out.”

VA also has a memorandum of understanding with the University of New Mexico, where Dr. Lin and Dr. Ryman are on the faculty. VA’s TTP and the university’s tech transfer office will work together to bring the resulting technology to market.

While the researchers’ discovery and the prototype being developed by TTAP have great potential to help people with neurodegenerative conditions, there is more work still to be done. The team has submitted grant applications to NIH for a new round of clinical trials to test whether more prolonged use of the treatment would have greater effect. The proposed study calls for testing multiple sessions over a longer period of time.

Larger clinical trials will also be needed to measure the effects of this new treatment on cognitive function, as well as testing to figure out the effects of factors such as time of day the treatment is administered.

Despite the work ahead, Dr. Lin is excited by the potential of the new discovery. He believes this approach could help people not only with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, but many other neurodegenerative conditions.

“I’m hoping that even though we started with Parkinson’s disease, since all these terrible conditions have accumulated proteins, we can have a beneficial impact on many populations that have no answers,” explained Dr. Lin.

He even has hope that the discovery could have far-reaching impacts beyond patients with neurodegenerative conditions. Dr. Lin sees the possibility that this technique could be used in a preventative manner to promote brain health. With more refinement, a device delivering the treatment could provide a readily accessible means of addressing neuroinflammation.

The development of this new brain flush technology is a prime example of how VA’s integrated health care system can speed up the process of translating research into results that can improve the lives of Veterans and the American people. When researchers like Dr. Lin have a breakthrough, VA programs like TTP are in place to help bring the ideas to fruition.

“That’s our prerogative,” said Bailey. “We want to get technology out there to the American public and of course our Veterans.”

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