One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It?

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The latest here:

One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It?

By Carl Zimmer

• April 2, 2019

Leer en español

In 2011, Dr. Dena Dubal was hired by the University of California, San Francisco, as an assistant professor of neurology. She set up a new lab with one chief goal: to understand a mysterious hormone called Klotho.

Dr. Dubal wondered if it might be the key to finding effective treatments for dementia and other disorders of the aging brain. At the time, scientists only knew enough about Klotho to be fascinated by it.

Mice bred to make extra Klotho lived 30 percent longer, for instance. But scientists also had found Klotho in the brain, and so Dr. Dubal launched experiments to see whether it had any effect on how mice learn and remember.

The results were startling. In one study, she and her colleagues found that extra Klotho protects mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease from cognitive decline. “Their thinking, in every way that we could measure them, was preserved,” said Dr. Dubal.

She and her colleagues also bred healthy mice to make extra Klotho. They did better than their fellow rodents on learning mazes and other cognitive tests.

Klotho didn’t just protect their brains, the researchers concluded — it enhanced them. Experiments on more mice turned up similar results.

“I just couldn’t believe it — was it true, or was it just a false positive?” Dr. Dubal recalled. “But here it is. It enhances cognition even in a young mouse. It makes them smarter.”

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Five years have passed since Dr. Dubal and her colleagues began publishing these extraordinary results. Other researchers have discovered tantalizing findings of their own, suggesting that Klotho may protect against other neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Now Dr. Dubal and other researchers are trying to build treatments based on these results. Either by injecting Klotho into the body or by stimulating the brain to make more of the hormone, they hope to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The researchers developing these treatments readily acknowledge that they may fail. And other Klotho experts think there’s a huge amount of work left to do first to figure out how Klotho affects the brain.

“You’ve got all of this amazing stuff showing a really major impact, but we can’t really explain why,” said Gwendalyn D. King, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “That’s where we’re stuck.”

But what happens if scientists get unstuck? What if a drug that enhances cognition really were possible?

Eric Juengst, the director of the University of North Carolina Center for Bioethics, has been thinking about these questions for two decades — back when such drugs were little more than thought experiments.

We tend to think of drugs that enhance performance — say, sports doping — as bad. Drugs that cure or prevent diseases are good. “The scientific community and the public all draw that line,” said Dr. Juengst.

When it comes to Klotho, there may be no such line. In theory, such a drug might offer both a way to prevent diseases of the brain and to enhance it.

Recent research is giving these questions a sudden urgency, according to Dr. Juengst.

“It’s exciting for someone who’s been doing armchair work on this for a long time to see it happening in the real world,” he said. “But it also makes it all the more pressing that this conversation get started in earnest.”