Teaching an Old Drug New Tricks: Leprosy Medicine Holds Promise as Therapy for Autoimmune Diseases.

(From AScribe)

BALTIMORE -- A century-old drug that failed in its original intent to treat tuberculosis but has worked well as an antileprosy medicine now holds new promise as a potential therapy for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.

"We never expected that an old antibiotic would hit this target that has been implicated in multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and type 1 diabetes," says Johns Hopkins pharmacologist Jun O. Liu "People have been working for years and spending tens of millions of dollars on developing a drug to inhibit a specific molecular target involved in these diseases, and here, we have a safe, known drug that hits that target," known as the Kv1.3 potassium channel. …