A company out of Massachusetts could be well on its way to developing a treatment for one variation of Parkinson’s disease.

Kalle Gehring is a researcher at McGill University. He says about three years ago, a pharmaceutical company called Biogen reached out to him. They had developed a drug that binds to a protein in some Parkinson’s patients called ‘parkin’.  Once the molecule bonded to the protein, it seemed to ‘cure’ the mutation.

Gehring and his team were enlisted to find out how exactly the drug molecule did this. Using the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan, they learned that the drug molecule serves as a glue, binding two proteins together, and ultimately ‘turning on’ the patient’s parkin protein.

Gehring says hypothetically, the drug would only work for a certain subset of patients whose parkin proteins were mutated.

“Parkinson’s disease is a pretty complex disease. There are different forms, and the genetic forms often present in younger patients. One of the proteins that is mutated in these younger patients is called parkin.”

Although only a few people have this genetic mutation, the number of people that battle with Parkinson’s in Canada is over 100,000.

He admits that the drug they studied isn’t fit for human consumption due to how it would be metabolized by the body, but next steps include working with other compounds from the company to see if they are better candidates for becoming an available drug for Parkinson’s patients.

“It’s a big step forward in that we know now that we can turn on parkin with small molecules, and these small molecules can be turned into drugs.”