A New Drug on the Horizon?

Troriluzole.  I've never heard of it before.  But it just popped up on my radar as a new treatment candidate for Alzheimer's disease.  It's currently being investigated as a treatment for some forms of cerebellar ataxia (like mine?), obsessive-compulsive disorder, and some other neurological disorders.  It's a formulation of the existing drug riluzole that is used to treat ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease.  The re-formulation is to increase its bioavailability.  

But suddenly, a study from Auburn University in Alabama, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, indicates that it may treat underlying mechanisms in Alzheimer's disease ... in mice.  Mice again, but you have to start somewhere.  At least we already have a lot of experience with the riluzole from a safety standpoint.  And administration of the drug to genetically modified mice -- modified to produce a disease like Alzheimer's -- improved their memory and cognition.

It's probably a long way from the work with mice to an approved treatment.  But what's interesting about this investigation is that it may lead to better insight on how Alzheimer's actually works.  It's increasingly evident that removing amyloid plaques simply addresses symptoms, not the underlying disease.  But most of the drug strategies getting attention are about removing plaques.  And sometimes removing plaques doesn't even help.  So it may be that, not only do we get a new drug that will deal more directly with the underlying disease, but we will learn more about what the disease even is.  (Because we don't really know!)

Here's an article about the research.  But beyond what I've said here, the discussion gets pretty deep.