ALS

[Anne135]

Hi everyone,

A study which appeared in the August 10th issue of THE Journal of Biological Chemistry discusses a new treatment idea for ALS The study was carried out by Kinemed, a unique Californian drug-discovery company which identifies suitable drugs by targeting disease-promoting pathways. (www.kinemed.com)

In this study they used a combination of two drugs, “noscapine” which is a very old cough medicine, and “pioglitazone” which is a commonly used anti-diabetes drug (commercially known as “Actos”). The study was done on a mouse-model of ALS, and showed the ability of the two drugs combined to significantly slow progression of ALS symptoms and greatly prolong survival.

Here is the link to the study

http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/M703434200v1.pdf

Pioglitazone – or Actos is commonly available and physicians may agree to prescribe it for off-label use.

Noscapine is a non-addictive part of the opium plant which has been used for decades as a cough-medicine. It is still widely used in Europe and Asia. It is available OTC (over the counter) in many countries.

Noscapine was discovered about 10 years ago by Emory researchers (Dr. Harish Joshi) to have anti-cancer activity, and since then a Californian company – Cougar Biotechnology – has bought the patent rights and is developing it as an anti-cancer treatment.

There is a website www.noscapine.org which is sponsored by the Prostate Cancer Foundation which has recently done a study in prostate cancer They have a lot of information available there, including a list of suppliers.

I contacted them and asked about dosage levels. They referred me to Medinsight (www.medinsight.org) who collected and summarized the information about noscapine. I contacted them and Moshe Rogosnitzky, their director of research, answered my email.

This is what he replied:-

Noscapine is an interesting drug with an excellent safety record which has been used for close to 60 years. There is increasing interest in researching it for other uses. I am aware of a few new uses being researched, besides cancer and ALS

The dosage used in animals would be toxic in humans. When doing research in animals, you always use higher dosages than in humans. This is because the metabolism of mice works much faster than humans. A rough guideline is to use about 10 – 15% of the dosages used in mice. The dosage used in mice in the prostate cancer study was 300mg/k.g. as opposed to 100mg/k.g. used in the study of ALS. However, the mode of administration used in the ALS study was injection which would result in increased absorption.

Dosages being used by certain doctors for cancer patients range from 1,000mg per day to 2,500mg per day, usually in 3 divided doses. I have heard few reports of side effects at 1,000mg per day and it seems to be an effective dosage for quite a number of patients with cancer.

Sadly, it is unlikely that any drug company will develop the combination therapy further because there is little they can do to enforce their patent rights, as both drugs are generically available. However, as with Emory University who produced a slightly modified version of noscapine which they patented and is exclusive to them, perhaps the same will happen with this new research. This remains to be seen, and I would love to be proved wrong.

MedInsight will be covering novel therapeutic possibilities for ALS too. We focus on making available information about off-label uses of existing drugs, and ways of testing their suitability for individual patients. Our focus is on those drugs which are non-profitable for the drug-companies to market, and therefore doctors and patients are unlikely to have read the research about them. If you consider that a doctor on average reads one new study a day, and that on average 6,000 new studies a day are published in biomedical research, you can understand why there is such a growing divide between research and practice. This divide is what MedInsight intends to bridge.

So there you have it. Anyone who can obtain more information, please post for everyone’s benefit.

Here again are the links:-

Kinemed which did the study in ALS www.kinemed.com
The study in ALS in mice http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/M703434200v1.pdf
Emory University – Dr. Harish Joshi http://cellbio.emory.edu/research_labs_joshi.cfm
Cougar Biotech - http://www.cougarbiotechnology.com/
Noscapine website – www.noscapine.org
MedInsight Research Institute www.medinsight.org

Best of health to all,

Anne