-- U.S. researchers say they've identified a potential new drug
target to treat Parkinson's disease.

In experiments with cells and animals, a team at the MassGeneral
Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease found that blocking the
action of an enzyme called SIRT2 helps protect neurons damaged in
Parkinson's disease from the toxic effects of the protein alpha-
synuclein, which accumulates in the brains of people with
Parkinson's disease.

Blocking SIRT2 may also help in the treatment of other
neurodegenerative diseases in which abnormal proteins accumulate in
the brain, the researchers said.

Their findings appear online on the Science Express Web site and
will be published in an upcoming print issue of the journal Science.

"We have discovered a compelling new therapeutic approach for
Parkinson's disease, which we expect will allow our scientists -- as
well as those at pharmaceutical and biotech companies -- to pursue
innovative new drugs that will treat and perhaps even cure this
disorder," study leader Aleksey Kazantsev, director of the
institute's Drug Discovery Laboratory, said in a prepared statement.

"Since the same sort of aggregation of misfolded proteins has been
reported in Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases, we plan to test
this approach in those conditions as well," Kazantsev said.