Great news for those poor mice!

[bassofspades]

irishcentral.com/news/dubli...

Irish drug that cures Parkinson’s in mice gets Michael J. Fox backing

[Rhyothemis]

It is good news to have a disease modifying therapy to trial in humans & NLRP3 is a really interesting target which is common to many neurodegenerative diseases - so this could be a really big deal.

However, to me the word 'cure' implies that you do a course of treatment and you are done. A small molecule NLRP3 inhibitor would be disease-modifying, but most likely would have to be taken on a continuing basis. Or maybe not, a limited course of treatment may be enough to break the vicious circle of inflammation <-> mitochondrial dysfunction. We'll see, I guess.

[bassofspades in reply to Rhyothemis]

Yep. We'll see!

[Despe]

Does anyone watch a TV program called "The Blacklist"? I watch an episode last night titled "The Pharmacist." If you watch this particular episode, you will realize how Big Pharma and individual scientists work. Don't expect a "cure" from the Big Pharma researchers. They will make a profit for inventing "the cure" but not as much as selling "symptom controlling" meds taken for lifetime.

[MarionP]

Very interesting new work on flu viruses, particularly the H1N1 of a few years ago and going back to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and some subsequent ones. These viruses simply killed the dopamine making neurons in the brains of the mice they infected...started when the researcher from St. Jude's Children's Hospital saw a duck on a video in Asia doing what he described as "that duck has Parkinson's."

So between the gut/vagus nerve connection and its possible treatments, and possible viruses that kill dopamine neurons dead (as well as induce MS type damage in other parts of the brain), maybe good things.

And add on top of that pesticide exposures, and (I suspect) other pollutants such as all that arsenic from rice and lead from so many surprising sources, and weakened immune systems from other types of influences, the alpha synuclein angle, there are still a lot of things to be running down. Plenty of things to do.

In 1975 my college Chancellor was a physician named Dr. William Danforth. Among other things, he was noted for his belief that the biggest threat to humankind would be environmental pollution, which they told me he had been saying for some years by that time. Boy was he ever prescient.

The chain of the bird flu virus story starts here: the-scientist.com/features/...