Ramping Up Autophagy

The most common therapeutic approach to treat Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease is to reduce the amount of the misfolding-prone proteins huntingtin and a-synuclein, respectively, before disease sets in. A study published in Nature Chemical Biology now points to an alternative way of accomplishing this goal using generic calcium channel blockers already on the market.¹ But basic translational questions including model choices and drug dosage remain to be resolved.

A group at the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research screened a library of 253 well-characterized preclinical compounds and approved drugs to identify small molecules that promoted a cellular recycling program called autophagy. Autophagy, or 'self-eating', is a cellular response to starvation and stress that may slow the accumulation of toxic protein aggregates associated with HD and PD...