Australian scientists make Huntington's discovery 16 August 2010 Australian scientists from the University of Melbourne have discovered the mutant protein which leads to the incurable Huntington’s disease. This research has just been published in the prestigious US Journal of Biological Chemistry. The discovery will help in the development of a targeted treatment for the disease. Huntington’s is a neurological condition caused by the inheritance of a defective gene. A disease which has long puzzled scientists, it progressively affects the body and leads to incapacitation and death some fifteen to twenty years after onset. Symptoms usually appear when people are in their thirties or forties, and each child of an affected parent has a 50 per cent chance of inheriting the defective gene. Dr Danny Hatters, who led the University of Melbourne team, said that the techniques used in this research “could have application in assisting to find drug targets for other neurodegenerative diseases where toxic clusters of proteins play a role in the progression of the disease, such as for Parkinson’s disease.” More information |