MS drug could prevent heart attacks
Monday 30th January 2012
A drug more commonly used to treat people with multiple sclerosis (MS) could be used to prevent heart attacks, according to new research from doctors in Manchester and Chicago.
The widely-used drug Gilenya, which lowers the number of lymphocytes in a person's body, was tested on mice and researchers found that it reversed symptoms of ventricular hypertrophy, commonly linked to heart attacks.
Whilst Gilenya is used to treat MS it is not quite clear why it works well at combating the condition. However, the teams from the University of Manchester and the University of Illinois in Chicago found that if the Pak1 enzyme within the drug could be better harnessed it could prevent attacks in humans.
Dr Xin Wang, a lecturer in molecular cardiology in Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, said: "This latest study used mice with a genetic modification of the Pak1 gene to show how the enzyme, when stimulated by Gilenya, prevented and even reversed the symptoms of ventricular hypertrophy."
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written by Mathew Horton
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