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Multiple sclerosis

An old drug plays a new trick

Nature volume 502, pages 314–315 (2013)Cite this article

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A drug already used to treat Parkinson's disease induces repair of the damage that occurs to the myelin sheath around nerve fibres during multiple sclerosis. The finding offers new therapeutic avenues for this disease. See Article p.327

What a change: just 20 years ago, multiple sclerosis was a disease without any promising treatment. Today, it has become treatable. Indeed, the number of drugs that effectively mitigate, although unfortunately do not cure, the disease is impressive, and is growing. But these drugs work well only in blunting the early inflammatory phase of multiple sclerosis, they do not help to restore myelin1 — the protective sheath surrounding the axons of neurons in the brain and spinal cord that is damaged in the disease. In this issue, Deshmukh et al.2 (page 327) identify a drug, benztropine, that may finally raise the hope of myelin repairFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: Identification of a myelin-promoting drug.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion2 were published online on 9 October 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hartmut Wekerle is in the Hertie Senior Professor Group, Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, 82152 Martinsried, Germany.,

    Hartmut Wekerle

  2. Edgar Meinl is at the Institute of Clinical Neuroimmunology, LMU Munich, 81377 Munich, Germany.,

    Edgar Meinl

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  1. Hartmut Wekerle
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  2. Edgar Meinl
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Correspondence to Hartmut Wekerle.

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Wekerle, H., Meinl, E. An old drug plays a new trick. Nature 502, 314–315 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12694

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