From the Friday, August 21, 1998 edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper
Abridged from the article by Leonard Zehr, Biotechnology Reporter
Shulman seeks people for drug study; Parkinson's trust needs volunteers to determine whether Deprenyl can increase life span.
Seventy-three-year-old Morton Shulman thinks he's found the Fountain of Youth. Beginning Monday, the Parkinson's Charitable Trust will begin running ads in Toronto newspapers looking for 1,500 volunteers to participate in a long-term study to determine whether the drug Deprenyl can make you live longer and better.
"Without Deprenyl, I would have been dead in 1989," said Dr. Shulman, who was instrumental in setting up the trust after he contracted Parkinson's disease 15 years ago. Today, pharmaceutical companies are developing more than 150 medicines for the debilitating diseases of aging. Moreover, Canadian researchers recently identified a gene that plays a central role in aging. And biologists, studying aging at the cellular and genetic levels, are finding that life span is far easier to manipulate than they had expected.
"Dr. Shulman has always had a nagging interest that Deprenyl slows down the breakdown of certain cells in the brain that cause the aging process," said Trevor Williams, the former head of the Parkinson Foundation of Canada. Mr. Williams left the foundation in March and will manage the new Deprenyl studies as the senior staffer at the Parkinson's trust.
Half of the 1,500 volunteers in the "double-blind" Deprenyl study will take five milligrams of the drug twice a week beginning in September, while the other half will take a like amount of a placebo. Dr. Shulman, who says Deprenyl is harmless and doesn't interact with any other drug, wants healthy individuals aged 40 to 65 for the 15-year study. Initial results will be reviewed in five years.
But the real drama will begin in the next 12 months when the Parkinson's trust will begin testing a newly developed derivative of Deprenyl on 1,500 new volunteers.
In an interview, Dr. Shulman said Jozsef Knoll, the Hungarian pharmacologist who originally invented Deprenyl, has been working with animals for the past three years to improve the drug. "By cutting off one part of the molecular chemical structure, Dr. Knoll has produced a drug that is 100 times more effective than Deprenyl."
The new drug, which is hush-hush because Dr. Knoll hasn't applied for a patent yet and hasn't published his findings, will also be tested against Deprenyl and a placebo next year. Dr. Shulman said that like Deprenyl, the new drug has no side effects. "The effect it has on dogs and cats and smaller animals is amazing. Dogs are living 50 per cent longer and smaller animals, like birds, live twice as long."
Cryonics Institute