Neuroscientist Alberto Costa switched specialties and dedicated his life to devising a drug for Down Syndrome when his daughter, Tyche (pronounced “Tishy”), was born with the condition:
In 2006, using mice with the equivalent of Down syndrome, Costa published one of the first studies ever to show that a drug could normalize the growth and survival of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain that is essential for memory and spatial navigation. In people with Down syndrome, the slower pace of neuron growth in the hippocampus is suspected to play a key role in cognitive deficits. Follow-up studies by other researchers reached conflicting results as to whether the drug Costa had tested, the antidepressant Prozac, could produce practical gains on learning tests to match its ability to boost brain-cell growth. Undeterred, Costa moved on to another treatment strategy. In 2007 he published a study that showed that giving mice with Down syndrome the Alzheimer’s drug memantine could improve their memory.
Now Costa has taken the next step: he is completing the first randomized clinical trial ever to take a drug that worked in mice with Down and apply it to humans with the disease, a milestone in the history of Down-syndrome research.
I’m amazed that Muriel Davisson was able to breed Down-syndrome mice:
Davisson, now semiretired from Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., spent the 1980s developing a mouse, known as Ts65Dn, that had many of the traits associated with Down syndrome, including, incredibly, the distinctive facial characteristics associated with the disease and the same slightly uncoordinated gait.
Here’s where the whole situation starts to creep me out:
But the effects of that revolution on Down research may yet be cut short. A competing set of scientists are on the cusp of achieving an entirely different kind of medical response to Down syndrome: rather than treat it, they promise to prevent it. They have developed noninvasive, prenatal blood tests which would allow for routine testing for Down syndrome in the first trimester of a pregnancy, raising the specter that many more parents would terminate an affected pregnancy. Some predict that one of the new tests could be available to the public within the year.
Costa, like others working on drug treatments, fears that the imminent approval of those tests might undercut support for treatment research, and even raises the possibility that children like Tyche will be among the last of a generation to be born with Down syndrome.
“It’s like we’re in a race against the people who are promoting those early screening methods,” Costa, who is 48, told me. “These tests are going to be quite accessible. At that point, one would expect a precipitous drop in the rate of birth of children with Down syndrome. If we’re not quick enough to offer alternatives, this field might collapse.”
Oh, my… the use of words there.
“Instead of treat it, they promise to prevent it.”
I had thought that by “prevent” they meant that they’d developed a method (drug, possibly) by which a coupld trying to get pregnant could prevent their child from getting Down’s — but they meant prevent in a different way. A far more sinister and creepy way. Yeesh!