People with a class of rare genetic disorders that often lead to brain damage, coma and death can be successfully treated with drugs, says a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

A study to appear in the June 2007 issue of The FASEB Journal describes a new agent, called "Zorro-LNA," which has the potential to stop genetic disorders in their tracks. In the study, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, describe how they developed Zorro-LNA to bind with both strands of a gene's DNA simultaneously, effectively disabling that gene.