Miglustat as a therapeutic agent: prospects and caveats

A viable treatment for lysosomal storage disease has been very difficult to attain. One option is pharmacological inhibition of synthetic pathways to reduce substrate accumulations. Miglustat N-butyldeoxynojirimycin (NBDNJ), an inhibitor of glucosylceramide synthase, has shown much promise in clinical trials for the treatment of Type I Gaucher disease. The molecular events invoked by NBDNJ in cell culture and in animal models have not been so …