August 15, 2001 — SAN FRANCISCO — Researchers believe the same drugs that are used to treat malaria and schizophrenia may also fight a human brain-wasting illness that is similar to mad cow disease.
Yesterday, scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, said they have been given federal approval to enroll about three-dozen severely ill patients in a study by the end of the year. Only patients given less than a year to live will be included.
Doctors will give them doses of the malaria drug, quinacrine, and the schizophrenia drug, chlorpromazine. Both drugs have shown promise in mouse cells infected with prions, abnormally shaped proteins that cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow.
Research is being led by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering prions.
Two women – one British, one American – believed to have forms of the disease have already been given the malaria drug by the university under a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy that allows for experimental therapies on terminally ill patients.
The family of the British patient said she showed significant improvement. The researchers were more cautious, stressing that the women are not part of the study and that no conclusions can be made about their reaction to the drug.
“We don’t know that this compound will work in people,” Dr. Fred Cohen, a prion researcher at UCSF, told The Associated Press.
Research rarely moves so quickly from testing on animal cells to human subjects, but this development warrants the speed, said George Carlson, a prion expert at the McLaughlin Research Institute in Bozeman, MT.
?This is something that can be tested right away. That’s the exciting part,? Carlson said.
While there are several types of the disease, the one that has drawn the most attention recently is called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It appears to be contracted by eating meat tainted by mad cow disease. Another version occurs spontaneously for unknown reasons in one of every million people.
In both variations, prions burrow deep sponge-like holes in brain tissue. There is no known cure. Instances of a disease resembling Creutzfeldt-Jakob have been discovered in the United States, while 105 people in Europe have been diagnosed with mad cow disease in the last five years. Thousands of cows have been slaughtered, and Europeans fear the disease, which is infectious and incubates for years without symptoms, could reach epidemic proportions unless a cure is found. — Mark A. DeSorbo