New PD Drug Target

[rayilynlee <rayilynlee@xxxxxxx>]

Study Identifies Drug Target for Parkinson's
Thursday, June 21, 2007; 12:00 AM
THURSDAY, June 21 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say they've
identified a potential new drug target to treat Parkinson's disease.
In experiments with cells and animals, a team at the MassGeneral Institute
for Neurodegenerative Disease found that blocking the action of an enzyme
called SIRT2 helps protect neurons damaged in Parkinson's disease from the
toxic effects of the protein alpha-synuclein, which accumulates in the
brains of people with Parkinson's disease.
Blocking SIRT2 may also help in the treatment of other neurodegenerative
diseases in which abnormal proteins accumulate in the brain, the researchers
said.
Their findings appear online on theScience ExpressWeb site and will be
published in an upcoming print issue of the journalScience.
"We have discovered a compelling new therapeutic approach for Parkinson's
disease, which we expect will allow our scientists -- as well as those at
pharmaceutical and biotech companies -- to pursue innovative new drugs that
will treat and perhaps even cure this disorder," study leader Aleksey
Kazantsev, director of the institute's Drug Discovery Laboratory, said in a
prepared statement.
"Since the same sort of aggregation of misfolded proteins has been reported
in Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases, we plan to test this approach in
those conditions as well," Kazantsev said.
More information
We Move has more about Parkinson's disease.
SOURCE: Massachusetts General Hospital, news release, June 21, 2007

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