Glaxo working on human mad cow drug

Drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline Plc will collaborate with Britain’s Medical Research Council to try to find a drug to treat the human version of mad cow disease.

They plan to screen hundreds of thousands of drug-like molecules in Glaxo’s library of compounds to find a potential therapy for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) which is caused by prion brain proteins that transform themselves into infectious agents.

“Many person years of very difficult work at the MRC have been invested to get to the stage where development of a drug to completely block prions appears realistic,” Professor John Collinge, of the MRC’s prion unit at The Institute of Neurology at University College London, said on Tuesday.

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Although there is no guarantee of success, he added that the research facilities and expertise available at Glaxo will enhance the search for a treatment for the fatal brain-wasting disease.

The scientists hope to find a compound that can enter the brain and bind to the normal prion to prevent it from changing its shape into the rogue version.

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They do not know how many people are likely to develop the illness, which is linked to eating meat contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), because of the long incubation period.

About 150 people have been affected since vCJD was first detected in the mid-1990s.

The two groups expect the search to find a candidate drug for potential human trials to take a further six years. Britain’s Department of Health is funding the research.