Apr 27, 2015,
Blocking a specific protein with a little-known, experimental drug restored balance in the immune systems of lab mice, preventing them from developing multiple sclerosis, researchers at San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes found.
The early research, published Monday in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, could chart a new course for the drug against MS, a potentially fatal disease where the immune system runs amok and attacks nerve cells’ protective covers. But the researchers note that some scientists — including one now at Google Inc.-backed Calico Life Sciences LLC — have thought that enhancing the same protein could slow the aging process.
Much research remains to be done, said Dr. Eric Verdin, co-senior author of the study and a senior investigator at the University of California, San Francisco-affiliated Gladstone Institutes. “I don’t want to raise false hopes,” he said.
Still, it is the balance between the potential anti-aging promise of activating the protein — called sirtuin 1, or SIRT1 — and its harmful role in inflammation in MS patients that makes it intriguing, Verdin said.
The findings also underscore the delicate seesaw action of the immune system in protecting us from disease without going hyperactive and attacking our bodies instead.
“It is a very complex but significant target,” Verdin said about SIRT1.
Gladstone researchers found that an experimental drug called EX-527, which was developed by shuttered Elixir Pharmaceuticals Inc., inhibited production of SIRT1 in laboratory mice engineered to develop MS. That blocking action protected the mice against the onset of MS, researchers said.
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