Huntington’s disease (HD) is a cruel, hereditary condition that leads to severe physical and mental deterioration, psychiatric problems and eventually, death. Currently, there are no treatments to slow down or stop it. HD sufferers are born with the disease although they do not show symptoms until late in life…
Lundbeck Inc. has announced the presentation of results from an open-label extension study of Xenazine® (tetrabenazine) for the treatment of chorea associated with Huntington’s disease (HD)…
Evotec AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, TecDAX) announced the extension of its collaboration with CHDI Foundation, Inc. (CHDI) through to the end of 2012. The collaboration, which is aimed at finding new treatments for Huntington’s disease and represents one of the largest joint innovation drug discovery CNS alliances within Evotec, will provide Evotec with up to US$ 37…
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALNY), a leading RNAi therapeutics company, today announced that it presented data from multiple pre-clinical and clinical programs at the “RNA Silencing: Mechanism, Biology, and Application” Keystone Symposium held January 14-19, 2010 in Keystone, Colorado…
Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have found some compounds that improve a cell’s ability to properly “fold” proteins and could lead to promising drugs for degenerative nerve diseases, including Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Misfolded proteins in nerve cells (neurons) are a common factor in all of these diseases…
All cells are equipped with a recycling programme to collect and remove unnecessary cellular components. Autophagy sequesters and digests aged organelles, damaged proteins and other components, which, if not disintegrated and recycled, threaten cell viability…
Scientists at the Brain Research Centre and Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics have uncovered a key cellular mechanism that alters brain cell function in Huntington’s disease, and identified a possible treatment for the disease. The results of the study were published online today and will appear in the January 28 edition of the journal Neuron…
A medication previously studied in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (latrepirdine) appears well tolerated and may improve thinking, learning and memory skills among individuals with Huntington’s disease, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals…
An early stage clinical trial of the experimental drug dimebon (latrepirdine) in people with Huntington’s disease appears to be safe and may improve cognition. That is the conclusion of a study published in the Archives of Neurology…
Elixir Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced that its partner, Siena Biotech S.p.A., has commenced Phase 1 clinical testing of Elixir’s potent, first-in-class SIRT1 (sirtuin-1) inhibitor for the treatment of Huntington’s Disease…
Inhibiting the protein Hsp70 rapidly reduces brain levels of tau, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease when it builds up abnormally inside nerve cells affecting memory, neuroscientists at the University of South Florida found. The study is reported online today in the Journal of Neuroscience…
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a “Grand Opportunity” grant of $3.7 million to a consortium formed with the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease (GIND) and the Taube-Koret Center for Huntington’s Disease Research to use stem cell technology to better understand Huntington’s disease (HD) and to develop potential therapies…
Working like an architect, Prof. Hagit Eldar-Finkelman of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine is “building” a new drug, L803-MTS, to treat a number of central nervous system (CNS) diseases like Alzheimer’s. In pre-clinical studies, it also shows promise against Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and diabetes…
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have shown that a highly specific intrabody (an antibody fragment that works against a target inside a cell) is capable of stalling the development of Huntington’s disease in a variety of mouse models…
Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and the University of California, San Diego have found that normal synaptic activity in nerve cells (the electrical activity in the brain that allows nerve cells to communicate with one another) protects the brain from the misfol…
Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and the University of California, San Diego have found that normal synaptic activity in nerve cells (the electrical activity in the brain that allows nerve cells to communicate with one another) protects the brain from the misfol…
The Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute is to provide stem cells to a five-member National Institutes of Health consortium of researchers for development of potential therapies to treat Huntington’s disease. As part of the $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute, directed by Clive Svendsen, Ph.D…
The European Medicines Agency has been formally notified by Amarin Neuroscience Ltd of its decision to withdraw its application for a centralised marketing authorisation for the medicine Ethyl Eicosapent (ethyl eicosapent), 500 mg soft gelatine capsules…
The kinase IKK phosphorylates the protein mutated in Huntington’s disease to promote its removal and neuron survival, but IKK may be a double-edged sword that increases neurotoxicity in later stages of the disease. The study, led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, was published online December 21 in the Journal of Cell Biology…
Scientists have identified a key molecular switch that may drive the onset of Huntington’s disease (HD), an incurable neurodegenerative disorder that leads to severe disruptions in muscle coordination and cognitive function…
Johns Hopkins brain scientists have figured out why a faulty protein accumulates in cells everywhere in the bodies of people with Huntington’s disease (HD), but only kills cells in the part of the brain that controls movement, causing negligible damage to tissues elsewhere…
Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have quantified the probability of a male who carries a “high normal” variant of the Huntington’s Disease (HD) gene having a child who develops the disease. Although thought to be a very rare event, the probability has never been estimated using current information and disease guidelines…
A research published on bmj.com reports that individuals with a family history of genetic disease are frequently discriminated by their relatives, friends and also by insurance companies. Many individuals have been able to adapt treatment and inform reproductive decisions thanks to the developments in genetic testing…
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered how the mutated huntingtin gene acts on the nervous system to create the devastation of Huntington’s disease. The report of their findings is available in Nature Neuroscience online…
Researchers at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center and Graduate Center for Toxicology (GCT) have gained new insight into the genetic mechanisms underlying Huntington’s disease and other neurodegenerative or neuromuscular disorders caused by trinucleotide repeats (or TNRs) in DNA. The research, performed in the laboratory of Dr…
