A drug first developed more than 70 years ago to treat Parkinson’s disease may soon play a surprising new role—helping the body fight tuberculosis (TB), the world’s deadliest infectious disease.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have discovered that benztropine, a medication used since the 1950s to control tremors in Parkinson’s patients, can dramatically reduce TB-causing bacteria by boosting the body’s natural immune response.
Their findings were published in npj Antimicrobials and Resistance.
TB, which mainly attacks the lungs, kills an estimated 1.3 million people every year.
Standard treatment involves months of multiple antibiotics, which can have serious side effects.
Even more worrying, TB bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to these drugs, making them harder to treat.
“New approaches for treating tuberculosis are urgently needed,” said senior author Dr. Yossef Av-Gay, a professor of infectious diseases at UBC’s faculty of medicine.
“By enhancing immune function rather than targeting the bacteria directly, this could be a powerful tool against drug-resistant TB. And it’s a compound that has already proven safe in people with Parkinson’s.”
One of the biggest challenges in treating TB is that the bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can hide and survive inside macrophages—the very immune cells meant to destroy them.
Traditional antibiotics attack the bacteria head-on, but benztropine works differently. It blocks a receptor on macrophages that TB bacteria exploit to protect themselves. Once that receptor is blocked, the immune cells can regain their ability to kill the invaders.
This type of approach, called host-directed therapy, focuses on strengthening the body’s natural defenses rather than directly killing the bacteria.
“Because these therapies don’t directly target the bacteria, they’re far less likely to drive drug resistance,” explained lead author Dr. Henok Sahile, a postdoctoral researcher at UBC. “They can also be used alongside antibiotics to improve results, or in cases where antibiotics don’t work.”
To find benztropine, the team tested more than 240 drugs already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on immune cells infected with TB.
Benztropine stood out for its ability to dramatically lower bacterial counts in both human and mouse cells.
When tested in mice infected with TB, oral doses of benztropine reduced bacterial levels in the lungs by about 70%—a result similar to some current TB drugs. The medication also worked in a mouse model of Salmonella infection, suggesting it might help treat other bacterial diseases as well.
Because benztropine is already approved for human use, researchers hope it can move quickly into clinical trials for TB.
“Repurposing existing drugs is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to bring new treatments to patients,” said Dr. Av-Gay.
“With benztropine, we already know it’s safe, which means we can take the next steps much sooner.”
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Source: University of British Columbia.
