Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 19, 1990 TAG: 9004190577
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SCOT HOFFMAN CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Street heroin has been around for about 15 years. But about seven years ago an amateur chemist - a sloppy amateur chemist - took shortcuts while creating a designer version. He made heating or mixture errors during the process.
Instead of creating a heroin derivative, the chemist stumbled upon MPTP, the abbreviation for a substance that causes Parkinson's disease - or, at least, its symptoms - in 100 percent of the people who unwittingly take it.
In 1983, six people in California injected the substance. Within a week, all developed Parkinsonian symptoms - slow movement, rigid muscles and hand trembling, among others. Since then, more than 200 people who have taken synthetic heroin have been diagnosed as Parkinsonian.
Virginia Tech professor Neal Castagnoli was working as a chemist at the University of California at San Francisco when the batch of bad heroin hit the streets.
Castagnoli now is Tech's Harvey W. Peters Professor of Chemistry, a chair endowed specifically for Parkinson's disease research with a $3 million gift from Roanoke philanthropist Marion B. Via.
When Castagnoli learned of MPTP, he began his study of Parkinson's in earnest. He, like dozens of scientists worldwide, now depends on MPTP in his search for the cause of this perplexing disease.
"It was a terrible tragedy," he said. "But like so many things like this, it did some good . . . . It's really rejuvenated Parkinson's disease research."
Substances such as street heroin that pretend to be the genuine drug are called designer drugs. Because they are not the exact illicit substances described by law, they can become legal when the minor structural change is made.
In the past, Castagnoli said, it has taken several years for the government to enact laws banning each new designer drug. Lawmaking is more streamlined now. But, it would seem, to little avail.
"The number of structural possibilities is infinite," Castagnoli said. "The chemist can always come up with something different."
There is some good that comes from controlled tinkering with illicit substances, though. Demerol, or meperidine, which is used legally as a sedative, is a derivative of morphine.
And there's some bad.
People have died from overdosing on the designer drug Ecstasy, or X, which became popular about 10 years ago for the long-lasting, mescaline-type high it produces.
X is now illegal, but its use is still widespread, Castagnoli said.
Though he understands the allure of narcotics, Castagnoli said he cannot see why people would toy with something as unstable and dangerous as designer drugs.
"How anyone can get this stuff off the street and put it in their bodies is absolutely crazy," he said. "Absolutely crazy."
Since the discovery of the effect MPTP has in the body, huge advances have been made toward understanding Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that seems to strike at random and is almost never found in anyone younger than 50.
From this research some puzzles have been solved . . . and some created.
As of now, all anyone really knows about Parkinson's are its symptoms. What causes it, why some get it and not others, and when the disease begins its course are only the most rudimentary in an endless line of unanswered questions.
What scientists do know is that every human being is born with about two billion cerebral nerve cells, or neurons, which die off naturally throughout life and are not replaced. Neurons manufacture neurotransmitters, which are used to communicate with other nerve cells.
The portion of the brain called the substantia nigra is home to about 200,000 nerve cells that make the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is directly responsible for maintaining muscle control.
A normal death rate for neurons in the substantia nigra would leave a person with about 50,000 at age 70. But with Parkinson's disease, an unknown pathogen begins killing them off at an accelerated rate. When the death toll reaches about 180,000, the neurons stop producing dopamine, the brain cannot communicate with the body's muscles and the muscles literally freeze up.
When MPTP is put into the blood, however, it starts a sort of neuronal genocide, speeding nerve cell death so quickly that it does in days what Parkinson's takes decades to do.
Castagnoli works out of his Davidson Hall laboratory, a maze of bottle-ridden counters, glass cases and beakers filled with colored liquids.
He and his research team - his wife, who has a master's in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, four post-doctoral students, seven graduate assistants and three undergraduates - perform experiments with MPTP they manufacture themselves.
"We try to keep quantities small," Castagnoli said.
Much of his research involves testing natural and man-made substances in the environment, either for MPTP or a similar chemical, that may explain why one of every 100 people beyond age 60 develops Parkinson's disease.
More specifically, Castagnoli is interested in the way certain substances are metabolized in the body and whether the products of this metabolization - called endogenous compounds - are in any way toxic to the nerve cells in the substantia nigra.
They've tested such things as tea, wine and tobacco to see if they may trigger the onset of nigral cell death.
They don't.
And though some compounds they've looked at are slightly toxic to nigral cells - such as certain pesticides - until now, nothing encountered in everyday life can be directly blamed as a catalyst to Parkinson's disease.
But the researchers are making progress, and Castagnoli expects a breakthrough soon, either in his lab or in one of the many labs around the world where Parkinson's research is being done.
"We're onto something here," he said, smiling. "We'll find something soon."
***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on April 21, 1990 in Current\ Correction
Because of a reporter's error, Marion Via's name was misspelled in a story on Parkinson's disease research in Thursday's New River Current.
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Memo: spelling of Marion Via's name has been corrected in story