Harvard Professor Kwang-Soo Kim Discovers Cure for Parkinson’s in Mice

KZSU interviewed Harvard Professor Kwang-Soo Kim about his recent landmark paper (published in PNAS) in which he showed that 2 FDA approved drugs: Chloroquine and Amodiaquine cured mice who have Parkinson’s disease. The last phase of the research was done in collaboration with Professor Yoon Ho Sup at NTU, Singapore. The NTU team used NMR techniques to prove and show that Chloroquine molecules bound to the brain’s Nuur1 protein and so helped cure the mice with Parkinson’s.

Professor Kim, who is also the Director of the Molecular Neurobiology Lab at McLean Hospital, described how he has worked for more than 25 years to find a cure for Parkinson’s, He said that he and his team were lucky to find that the structure of Chloroquine and Amodiaquine helped to cure the mice with Parkinson’s, However, Professor Kim added that he believes that better drugs can be designed to help cure Parkinson’s. He envisions that these new drugs would have the same structure as Chloroquine and be safer for Parkinson’s patients . That is not to say that Chlorquine is not safe: it has been approved by the FDA as an antimalarial and has also been used to treat Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Professor Kim mentioned that the new drugs could possibly be designed to also treat other diseases that affect the middle part of our brains.

In the interview Professor Kim also discussed how his team, if they find funding, might start a Phase 1 Clinical Trial to test the effectiveness of using Chloroquine to treat Parkinson’s in humans.

KZSU broadcast this interview in July, 2015; it is available from this link.