New method to reduce accumulation of damaging Huntington’s disease protein

A study appearing in the journal Neuron suggests there may be a new way to change the damaging course of Huntington’s disease.

Neurobiologists have shown that reducing the aberrant accumulation of a particular form of the mutant Huntingtin protein corresponds to improvement in symptoms and neuroinflammation in HD mice.

They showed this by targeting and modulating levels of PIAS1 — a protein implicated in cancer and other diseases — which they found led to the reduction of the mutant Huntington protein. The work suggests that changing levels of the PIAS1 protein and targeting this pathway could have a benefit to disease.

Source: Reprinted from materials provided by the University of California, Irvine.

Paper: “PIAS1 Regulates Mutant Huntingtin Accumulation and Huntington’s Disease-Associated Phenotypes In Vivo”