Huntington’s disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease, which is an inherited disease, and the patient’s cells make a harmful substance called Huntington’s protein wrongly. Theses abnormal proteins accumulate into pieces, damage part of brain cells, especially those cells related to muscular control, which will lead to uncontrolled twitch, and patients could be able to develop dementia. And there is no good medical treatment in medical field currently.
But now, researchers, from Department of Genetics at University of Leicester, found a new potential therapeutic target of the disease. They proved that glutathione peroxidase can serve as guardian of the neurons in HD model animals. In this study, the researchers first found that the enzyme can protect cells in yeast. They proved that the enzyme can inhibit the progress of HD in multiple systems of baker’s yeast, drosophilae and cultured mammalian cells respectively. Researchers discovered many potential genes that can protect HD diseases by genome-wide scan firstly. And then they did further experiments in drosophilae and mammalian cells, they finally found that glutathione peroxidase activity protect the model animals from HD disease significantly.
More importantly, drugs similar to the enzyme activity have been conducted in clinical trials to treat other diseases, which also demonstrate that the drugs may have therapeutic effect on HD. The researchers point out that in addition to glutathione peroxidase, they also found a lot of related genes of HD, and these genes have an important significance in understanding the onset process of HD.
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