A new class of drugs may hold the key to treating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injury.

A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience yesterday showed a decline neuroinflammation in six-month old mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease. This type of brain inflammation is found in Alzheimer’s patients and patients with other neurological illnesses or brain injuries.

Researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging orally administered the drug MW151 to the mice. Eleven months later, they showed a reduction in brain inflammation and renewed function in their brain synapses.

The team of researchers constructed the study to mimic when a human patient would first show mild cognitive disturbance indicative of Alzheimer’s disease.

“We faced two main challenges,” Dr. Martin Watterson, professor of molecular pharmacology and biological chemistry at the Feinberg School and head developer of the drug, revealedl to Fox News. “Come up with something to tone down the inflammatory response and do it with some selectivity [so that the immune response would not be toned down as well]. We wanted to have a small molecule taken by mouth once or twice a day that would be relatively safe and get into the brain.”

According to Fox News, the new drug MW151 binds to and reduces production of a molecule called cytokine, which the body produces in large amounts when experiencing a neuroinflammatory reaction like traumatic brain injury. This class of drug aims to interfere with neurological illnesses in the early-to-middle phase of the inflammatory reaction – before neurons die due to excessive amounts of cytokine and other molecules that can attack healthy synapses of the brain.

Alzheimer’s disease can devastate a person’s cognitive processes and can result in memory loss and impairment of the abilities to reason, plan, use language and perceive, according to MedicineNet. Neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease also hinder the normal processes of the brain, severely affecting a person’s quality of life.