Antibiotic for Huntington’s disease?

Aiming to slow Huntington’s disease, Robert M. Friedlander of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has tested inhibitors of caspases, a family of enzymes that cells produce in their death throes (SN: 5/29/99, p. 351). An old antibiotic may offer an alternative: In mice genetically engineered to develop an illness similar to the neurodegenerative disease, the drug significantly delays the onset of symptoms and death, Friedlander and his colleagues report in the July Nature Medicine.