Georgetown neuroscientist Charbel Moussa, MBBS, Ph.D. and Fernando Pagan, M.D., director of the Movement Disorders Program, recently formed a unique collaboration to study a novel treatment for Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. Using an FDA-approved drug for leukemia, nilotinib (known as Tasigna® by Novartis), they were able to see statistically significant and encouraging changes in toxic proteins linked to disease progression in their small, phase 1 clinical trial.
The study’s findings were presented at Neuroscience 2015, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Chicago on Oct. 17.