A NOVEL drug combination may prevent the involuntary shaking and movements that affect people with Parkinson鈥檚 disease.
Parkinson鈥檚 patients lose the ability to make the vital neurotransmitter dopamine. They can be treated with L-dopa, which the brain converts into dopamine, but the drug has unwanted side effects. L-dopa also activates specific D3 dopamine receptors on brain cells, which causes involuntary movements known as dyskinesia.
Now Pierre Sokoloff鈥檚 team at the French national research agency鈥檚 Paul Broca Centre in Paris have banished dyskinesia in primates suffering from a form of Parkinson鈥檚. They administered L-dopa with a drug called BP897, the first to exclusively block these D3 receptors (Nature Medicine, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm875). Bioprojet, the company in Paris which developed BP897, expects to test it soon on human patients.
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