Huntington’s Hope

 At last there is hope that Huntington’s Disease, a fatal and incurable brain condition, might one day be treatable. An everyday antibiotic called minocycline alleviates symptoms in mice with the equivalent disease, say researchers in the US.

 In Huntington’s, a faulty gene makes brain cells commit suicide en masse. Minocycline puts the brake on this by inhibiting key enzymes called caspases that initiate programmed cell death. The drug might also slow cell death in other conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and strokes, according to a report in Nature Medicine (vol 6,p797).

 “Clearly, this is not a cure,” says Robert Friedlander of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the research. But it is an exciting step towards developing a combination drug therapy for Huntington’s, he says.