San Francisco - Doctors at a San Francisco hospital have treated two patients - one with the human form of mad cow disease, and the second with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - by digging up an antiquated drug.
The two were treated with quinacrine, an obsolete malaria drug widely used during World War II to treat malarial infections of the brain. Following the war, newer drugs replaced it.
Recently, however, researchers found in a random screening process that the drug killed mouse cells infected with the agent that causes mad cow disease, and they decided to test it quickly in people. A clinical trial is scheduled to start this fall.
Dr. Bruce Miller of the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says researchers are still "far from a cure."
"We are all hoping the drug will have some efficacy, but our eyes are wide open," he says.
Details of how the new use for the old drug was discovered are published in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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