Blocking a brain immune protein may slow how Parkinson's spreads
Penn researchers found that the brain's own immune cells pump out a protein, GPNMB, that helps Parkinson's damage jump between neurons — and antibodies can interrupt it.
Scientists at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have pinpointed a protein called GPNMB that appears to help Parkinson's-related damage spread from one brain cell to the next. Reporting in the journal Neuron, the team showed that microglia — the brain's resident immune cells — ramp up GPNMB production when nearby neurons are stressed or dying.
That response turns into a vicious cycle: as more neurons are damaged, microglia release more of the protein, which in turn accelerates degeneration in surrounding cells. In early experiments, monoclonal antibodies that blocked GPNMB stopped the toxic process from propagating between cells.
Because the mechanism acts early in the disease, the authors suggest that drugs targeting GPNMB could one day slow Parkinson's in its initial stages, rather than only easing symptoms after damage is done. The work is still pre-clinical, but it adds a promising new target to the pipeline.
This is an in-house summary. Read the full reporting at the original source:
