Slowing neurodegeneration in Huntington’s
Treatment that increases brain levels of an important regulatory enzyme may slow the loss of brain cells that characterizes Huntington’s disease (HD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. In a report receiving advance online publication in Nature Medicine, a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-based research team reports that increased expression of Sirt1, one of a family of enzymes called sirtuins, in the brain of a mouse model of HD protected against neurodegeneration. They also identified a potential mechanism for this protective effect. “Diseases such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease have different causative factors, but they share common themes — such as aggregation of misfolded proteins — and a unifying end point, the degenerative loss of neurons,” says the study’s senior author Dimitri Krainc of the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MGH-MIND) and Harvard Medical School, where he is an associate professor of neurology. “Pharmacological targeting of Sirt1 may provide an opportunity for therapeutic development...