Old Drug Holds New Promise

New findings in University of Texas, Austin's neurobiology labs suggest that rapamycin - an FDA-approved immunosuppressant used to control organ rejection in transplant patients - may be an effective therapy for Alzheimer's, epilepsy, and even autism. A UT team led by Professor Kim Raab-Graham of the College of Natural Sciences' Center for Learning and Memory is searching for an equivalent drug that can deliver the benefit without the side effects.

Transcript

00:00:00 >>Kim Raab-Graham: My lab is interested in the biological basis of Alzheimer's disease with the hope of creating new drug therapies. So rapamycin was discovered as an immuno-suppressant drug and it has been FDA approved for transplant patients. But what we're interested in is its usefulness for Alzheimer's disease and autism. New exciting data suggests that in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease these mice have non-convulsive seizures so they're not detectable unless you're actually doing an EEG. And rapamycin has been effective at reducing those seizures. The challenge is that rapamycin is an immuno-suppressant drug. What we're trying to understand is the mechanism by which rapamycin works so that we can develop new, safer drugs that have the positive effects of rapamycin without the side effects.

00:00:54 A drug like this could benefit diseases that affect learning and memory including Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and autism. [ MUSIC ]