clinical trials

Psilocybin as Antidepressant: Quick Acting, Lasting Benefits

Posted on by Kari Kenefick

Depression is not simply a mood disorder, a feeling of sadness, or being ill at ease. Depression can completely shut a person down, manifesting as an inability to make decisions, to take action, to think. Even sleep is affected by depression.

Researchers and clinicians who treat depression are learning that the physical manifestations can be mirrored by internal, cellular changes. Some people with depression have decreases in their gray matter volume, particularly in areas like the hippocampus (important to memory, learning, and emotions) and prefrontal cortex (where higher-level thought and planning abilities are based).

Additionally, imaging has shown a decrease in the number of synapses—the structures through which electrical or chemical signals are passed between neurons and other cells—in persons with chronic depression. Without the signals that synapses transmit, brain function is disrupted.

And without intervention in depression, synapse decrease can continue.

While there are drugs and behavioral therapies to treat depression, these therapies can be slow to act and sometimes ineffective. In addition, once synaptic loss has occurred, these therapies are less effective.

In their August 2021 paper, “Psilocybin induces rapid and persistent growth of dendritic spines in frontal cortex in vivo” (1), Shao et al. state,

“It has long been recognized that these compounds (serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin) may have therapeutic potential for neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction”.

Continue reading “Psilocybin as Antidepressant: Quick Acting, Lasting Benefits”

Prions Go Slow with ASOs: Experimental Treatment for ALS, Alzheimer’s and Other Prion-like Diseases

Posted on by Mariel Mohns

In the late-80’s through the 90’s, food and health agencies focused on a mysterious fatal brain disease that infected thousands of cattle. Bovine spongiform encephalitis—or “mad cow disease”—is caused by an infectious protein called a prion. Despite fears that tainted meat would cause the disease to spread to humans, mad cow disease never really made an impact on human health. However, forms of the prion disease such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease do affect humans.

In addition to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) are now thought to be a result of prion-like activity. There is no cure for these diseases, however, new experimental treatment strategies might help slow the progression of neural degeneration.

prion_bse_histology
The tell-tale “holes” of prion infection in brain tissue.
Continue reading “Prions Go Slow with ASOs: Experimental Treatment for ALS, Alzheimer’s and Other Prion-like Diseases”

A Reason for Ribonuclease: From Laboratory Nuisance to Cancer Therapeutic

Posted on by Kari Kenefick

"RNase A". Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RNase_A.png#/media/File:RNase_A.png
“RNase A”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RNase_A.png#/media/File:RNase_A.png

RNase, back in the early 1990s, posed a serious threat to laboratories working with RNA isolation. My graduate work involved isolating RNA from the tissues of Lyme disease-infected mice and hamsters. We struggled to DEPC-treat glass and plasticware, or autoclave anything that could be autoclaved, kept tissues cold during RNA harvest and held our breaths (truly, as aerosol could be another source of ribonuclease) until PAGE proved us successful in RNA isolation.

Ribonuclease (RNase) was omnipresent and the arch rival of our work, across several species, due to its RNA destroying abilities.

Now, a July 13, 2015 publication by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provided both a catch-up for this former lab rat on modern day research with and knowledge of RNase, as well as an exciting look at what may be a real purpose for this RNA-destroying molecule: RNase has moved to clinical trials due to the discovery of it’s cytotoxicity for cancer cells.

Raines’ group in the Department of Chemistry at UWI-Madison published in ACS Central Science their findings on the ligand that RNase 1 uses to attach to human cancer cells, in the article, “Human Cancer Antigen Globo H is a Cell-Surface Ligand for Human Ribonuclease 1”. Continue reading “A Reason for Ribonuclease: From Laboratory Nuisance to Cancer Therapeutic”