Caspases made headline news in the Huntington's world when Dr. Robert Friedlander and his colleagues in Boston announced that they could delay the onset of symptoms in a mouse model of Huntington's disease by blocking something called caspase-1.
Caspases are enzymes involved in the destruction of cells.
In a normal, healthy human being, damaged or mutated cells are regularly destroyed to protect the rest of the body. For example, if a cell turns cancerous, caspases destroy the cell before the cancer can spread. However, in a person with Huntington's disease, apoptosis goes out of control, and large areas of brain tissue are destroyed. Dr. Friedlander found that by blocking the action of one of these caspases, he could slow down the destruction of brain cells. There are several caspases involved in apoptosis.