Researchers from the University of Leeds have discovered that one of the body’s naturally occurring proteins is preventing 57 genes from operating normally in the brains of Huntington’s sufferers. In addition, the destructive nature of this protein could potentially be halted using drugs that are already being used to help cancer patients.
“This is a really exciting breakthrough,” says researcher Dr Lezanne Ooi. “It’s early days, but we believe our research could lead to radical changes in treatment for Huntington’s sufferers. The fact that these cancer drugs have already been through the clinical trials process should speed up the time it takes for this research to impact directly on patients.”
Huntington’s is an inherited degenerative neurological disease characterized by a loss of neurons in certain regions of the brain and progressively affects a sufferer’s cognition, personality and motor skills.
Dr Ooi’s research was funded by The Wellcome Trust and carried out in collaboration with the University of Milan and King’s College London. The paper has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.