| Living With Huntington Disease |
As announced at the Huntington Society's Annual Conference in Halifax on 20 October, there's more important news on the research front C two announcements from the United States move us closer still to our goal of defeating Huntington disease. In the 18 October edition of Nature, a team of scientists at the University of California at Irvine announced that they had prevented cell death in the fruit fly model of Huntington's using compounds called Ahistone deacetylase inhibitors@ (HDAC). Histone deacetylase inhibitors are currently being tested as chemotherapy agents for cancer, and could be moved quickly into clinical trials for Huntington disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. In the 15 October 2001 edition of Nature Genetics, investigators in Rochester have proposed a new model of cell death in HD. Until now, it has been thought that the abnormal protein produced by the HD gene breaks down in cells, and that damage is caused by the fragments containing the expanded region which characterizes HD. This new study suggests that the abnormal protein actually resists being broken down, and that it swallows up other proteins in brain cells, including normal huntingtin protein, thereby causing a loss of cell function and eventual cell death. These two announcements are complementary in a very important respect, because they illustrate remarkable progress on both the scientific and clinical fronts. It's clear that our understanding of what goes wrong in cells affected by Huntington disease is moving forward hand-in-hand with the identification of new compounds which may prove to be beneficial for affected individuals. Between 1998 and now, the Huntington Society of Canada's financial commitment to HD research has doubled. Through its NAVIGATOR Coalition programme, the Society is a leader of the global campaign to discover a cure for Huntington disease. |
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