Are We Getting Closer to Treating Parkinson’s Disease or Not?

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You might think I'm lying or that it's strange when I say we might already have a treatment for Parkinson's sitting in front of us.

A cancer drug which is something designed for an entirely different purpose might be the key you've been looking for to slow the spread of a disease that affects millions every year. There's a drug called nivolumab and it's already FDA-approved. That particular drug could be repurposed to treat Parkinson's disease effectively. But I'm as skeptical as you are about it because it does sound too good to be true with the limited technical of our time.

We’ve known for a long time that proteins like alpha-synuclein create problems in the brains of Parkinson’s patients. Those proteins misfold, clump up and somehow spread between neurons. We're in a situation where trying to use it create more problems.

But now, with this new discovery involving Aplp1 and Lag3, researchers have been able to pinpoint another part of that spread. It’s sounds like progress in the medical field, but the question is what exactly do we actually do with this new discovery?

We can start by testing it on mice and maybe it'll work, but people with Parkinson’s don’t have time to wait for "maybe."

Aplp1, Lag3, help these harmful protein clumps invade healthy cells. We being able to block them, even partially, could bring great improvement to treating the disease.

Another question I'm asking is if we have a possible solution to treating such a disease then what's taking the scientists so long to do so? If we have a drug that already targets one of these proteins, why isn’t this a bigger deal and all over the news yet?

I guess it’s because we’ve been here before. We have our hope raised by potential solutions and then reality checks in with disappointing failure of the tests. But maybe this time, we might actually get somewhere with discovery, I hope so.