News by Subject Medicine & Health

Scientists at the lab of Professor Hilal Lashuel at EPFL have identified a new enzyme called "TBK1" who plays a central role in regulating the degradation and clearance of the huntingtin protein and introduces chemical modifications that block its aggregation. "We believe that this represents a viable target for the development of possible treatment of Huntington's disease," says Lashuel.

Amsterdam, NL, August 3, 2020 - A review of currently registered clinical trials of agents targeting Parkinson's disease (PD) reveals that there is a broad pipeline of both symptomatic and potentially disease-modifying therapies currently being evaluated. Investigators report that the outlook for patients is encouraging, given the wide range of therapeutics being clinically tested. They emphasize the importance of engaging the Parkinson's community in the research. Their analysis and results are published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease.

Researchers at Kanazawa University report in ACS Nano a high-speed atomic-force microscopy study of the formation of protein fibrils (amyloids) associated with pathologies in collaborated research with Showa University. Mixing different variants of a single protein and changing the acidity of its environment is shown to result in significant variations in amyloid structure and elongation rates.

How decisions are made and how behavior is controlled is one of the most important questions in neuroscience. The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a central role in all of this. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), together with researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, looked into the role that dopamine plays in the decision-making process and in controlling movement.

Muscle physiologist Ned Debold and colleagues at UMass Amherst sought an alternative energy source to replace the body's usual one, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Such a source could control muscle activity, and might lead to new muscle spasm-calming treatments in cerebral palsy, for example, or activate or enhance skeletal muscle function in MS, ALS and chronic heart failure. They report this month that they have made a series of synthetic compounds to serve as alternative energy sources for the muscle protein myosin.