Yes, I think there are definitely a lot of success stories out there. I still cringe when people say we're going to have a cure for Parkinson's in five or ten years, because nobody knows. Nobody knows which area it's going to come from. I think you have to be very open to different ideas.
If you look at some of the trials that are starting up on different compounds, there's a whole new wave of treatments that are starting to get into clinical trials. I think you heard a little from my colleague Michael Schlossmacher last week about things like alpha-synuclein in the brain. We now have the ability to recognize and identify compounds that will affect alpha-synuclein levels in your brain, so we're now trying them out in people. This is something nobody dreamed of five years ago. If we can give somebody a compound that directly decreases the amount of this abnormal protein that's accumulating in people's brains, is that going to work? Well, it's certainly exciting, but we don't know yet.
I'm doing a clinical trial right now where one line of evidence in some mice identified that it looks like there's a problem with calcium homeostasis, a calcium problem in the main energy cells in the brain. You do a big drug screen because you've identified this brand new pathway, and it turns out there's a blood pressure pill that's already on the market in the United States that affects this very particular receptor. So we're now trying this out on people. Can we change how the energy cells part of the brain are working by giving a compound?
This was only discovered three years ago, and we're already trying it on people, because we now have the technology to screen drugs that are already on the market and see if they already have an effect. Instead of waiting 20 years to go through all the safety data for all the different things that could potentially go wrong with a drug, let's screen the 10,000 drugs that are already on the market and that might have an affect on this brain process.
There's no question that we're better. There's no question that we have made a lot of improvements. There's no question that we've identified new pathways that we can test new compounds in.
So we're doing a much better job, but as I said, do we have the answer yet? No.