Pardridge W M. Cambridge University Press, 2001, £65.00. ISBN 0 521 80077 3

This very timely book describes the state of the art techniques to target drugs to the brain. For almost 30 years, the author has been an inspiring advocate for this field, and is the author of close to 300 papers in international peer reviewed journals on this subject.

Neuro(patho)logists consider the blood–brain barrier as an irreducible fortress. However, it houses active transport mechanisms for large pharmacologically engineered molecules that can also be protected from being cleared from the blood and peripheral degradation. All the essential and state of the art science and technology to target drugs to the brain has been incorporated into this book and placed in the context of the philosophy of the author. This has the advantage that it is in a single context, but at the same time it is limited to the view of only one person. Nevertheless, this approach is very important to provide a fast and fundamental insight into the various aspects of drug targeting to the brain.

This book is a comprehensive overview on the various possibilities of targeting drugs to the brain, including invasive brain drug delivery, lipid mediated and carrier mediated transport of small molecules, receptor mediated transcytosis of peptides, vector discovery for brain targeting, linker strategies for multidrug formulations, protein neurotherapeutics and peptide radiopharmaceuticals, antisense neurotherapeutics and imaging gene expression, gene therapy of the brain, and the future: blood–brain barrier genomics.

Pardridge has provided us with a book that will become a standard on drug targeting to the brain and adds to future hope on curative instead of palliative treatment of central nervous system diseases. The book is a must for everybody who works in the field of brain drug delivery in academia as well as in the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, the book is well referenced with up to date references and includes a convenient subject index.