October 11, 2001 WASHINGTON (AP) - One of the first patients to test a possible therapy for a brain-destroying illness similar to mad cow disease has died while a second patient grew worse, the lead researcher said.
Tests are continuing in hopes the drug ultimately will work. "I am optimistic we will have some success," Dr. Stanley Prusiner of the University of California, San Francisco, told a neuroscience meeting at the National Institutes of Health.
Part of the experiment is figuring out if scientists are using the best dose of the drug, he said.
At issue is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, which literally eats holes in the brain. It can strike sporadically - about one in a million people worldwide each year. A new version, "new variant CJD," is a cousin of mad cow disease that apparently is contracted by eating infected beef.
Mad cow disease has never been found in the United States. The disease has infected cattle in much of Europe, and the human version has struck more than 100 people overseas, mostly Britons.
Prusiner's lab generated excitement in August when researchers began testing if the malaria drug quinacrine could help people about to die from CJD. Test-tube studies of mouse cells had shown quinacrine successfully inhibited infectious prions, the abnormal proteins that cause CJD.
The first person given the drug, a 20-year-old British woman with new variant CJD, initially showed modest improvement in some symptoms, Prusiner said Wednesday. Her condition has worsened, he said.
A 66-year-old American man with regular CJD had three weeks of therapy before his family decided to stop the experimental treatment, and he died, Prusiner said.
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
