Repurposed drug battles ‘brain-eating’ amoeba

In the summer of 2021, a 54-year-old man was brought to a hospital in Northern California after an unexplained seizure. When an MRI revealed a mysterious mass in the left side of his brain, he was transferred to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Medical Center. A brain biopsy and other tests revealed not a tumor, but an incredibly rare infection of the central nervous system caused by the amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris . One of several “brain-eating” amoebae that occasionally spark headlines, the pathogen kills more than 90% of people who contract it. But despite initial setbacks, the patient survived and has largely recovered after experimental treatment with a decades-old drug. As his UCSF medical team recounted in a paper last month , a desperate hunt for a cure led them to a study published several years ago in which researchers showed a drug originally developed in Europe to quell urinary tract infections was effective against Balamuthia in the laboratory. That discovery sent the medical team rushing to obtain the drug, nitroxoline, from abroad so it could be given for the first time to a Balamuthia patient. Researchers not involved with the case call the man’s recovery a breakthrough in treating a brain infection that’s long been presumed to be a death sentence. “It’s the best that I ever remember seeing with Balamuthia,” says Dennis Kyle, a cell biologist at the University of Georgia, Athens, who studies a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research