For years, doctors have treated the Parkinson's disease symptoms they could see: the shaking hands, the stumbling feet.

But one of the likely causes of Parkinson's is almost invisible. It's buried deep within brain cells, where tiny engines called mitochondria slowly are shutting down.

Now a team of researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a biotech company in Charlottesville, say they think they've found a way to rev up those engines once again, potentially reversing the disease.

Every cell in your brain is packed with mitochondria tiny engines that generate the energy cells need to function. But sometimes these brain cells do a curious thing. They turn off the signals to make mitochondria, depriving themselves of power. The tiny engines sputter and eventually cease to operate.

Essentially, "the brain is divorcing its mitochondria," says Dr. James P. Bennett Jr., director of the university's Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center. This, scientists recently discovered, appears to be a likely root cause of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and other heretofore mysterious brain disorders.

In 2004 one of Bennett's graduate students, Shaharyar Khan, developed a way to deliver healthy mitochondrial DNA directly into mitochondria via a protein carrier. In mice and cultured human cells, this method of gene therapy has been shown to revive the mitochondria, restoring the cell to normal function.

"It's novel," Bennett says. "No one else has it."

In January the researchers asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval to begin human clinical trials. The approval process may take a while, but Bennett's optimistic the team will be able to begin the trials this year.

One of Bennett's colleagues, Dr. Patricia A. Trimmer, is pursuing another promising therapy for Parkinson's patients: near-infrared laser light. The laser beam painlessly penetrates a person's skull, stimulating brain cells and rousing their sluggish mitochondria.

Trimmer shows speeded-up video clips of two sets of mitochondria, which look like tiny white rods traversing a long, narrow nerve cell. In the first video, they creep like rush-hour traffic. In the second video, after being treated with the laser light, they're zipping around like go-karts.

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The Brain-Makers