Drug designed to help alcoholics might be the key to treating progressive blindness

Disulfiram is the oldest drug out there to treat alcoholism, but new research might be giving it a second life in a very different field.

The drug is designed to inhibit the enzymes necessary to metabolize alcohol, which is what makes drinking while taking it so unpleasant. But disulfiram also decreases the body’s ability to make retinoic acid, which is linked to vision loss. After administering the drug to nearly blind mice, a team of researchers at University of California (UC), Berkeley found that the mice were much more able to detect images on a computer screen compared to mice that weren’t given disulfiram.

This work could have serious implications for anyone with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a genetic disorder that slowly breaks down cells in the retina, causing progressive vision loss over time. RP is the No. 1 inherited cause of blindness, affecting roughly one in every 4,000 people in the U.S. The research team, led by Richard Kramer, Ph.D., of UC Berkeley and Michael Goard, Ph.D., of UC Santa Barbara, is planning a clinical trial to test disulfiram for patients with RP.

Click here to read the full article at FIERCE Biotech

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