Almost 10 million for research on cytisine! - Uniwersytet for Beginners

Sara Zarate and Gauri Pandey, graduate trainees from the laboratory of Rahul Srinivasan, assistant teacher in the Department of Neuroscience & Experimental Rehabs, are co-first authors of the research study. Their findings are published in the Journal of Neurochemistry. There are around 10 million people worldwide dealing with Parkinson's illness, a neurodegenerative condition that causes a range of symptoms that can consist of difficulty strolling, tremors, shaking and others unrelated to motion.

Currently, there is no remedy for Parkinson's and no treatment that can stop or prevent the loss of these dopamine nerve cells that are required for the body to move. About a decade earlier, Srinivasan ended up being interested in attempting to understand why cigarette smokers and individuals who consume tobacco chronically are at a lower risk for establishing Parkinson's disease.

"But individuals actually do not comprehend why that is, because tobacco and smoke contain many different chemicals. One of the chemicals clearly is nicotine, and that explains the addicting residential or commercial properties of tobacco and cigarette smoke. So, I began to study the possible function of nicotine in this protective impact against Parkinson's illness." Provided the fact that it is really hard to carry out human and animal trials utilizing nicotine due to severe side-effects, Srinivasan decided to check cytisine as an alternative to nicotine.

"What cytisine does is it binds to target receptors but does not activate them as effectively as nicotine," Srinivasan said. "It keeps the receptors 'inhabited' and 'chaperones' them to the surface of the neuron. Because cytisine is a natural compound, is offered rather easily and is pretty inexpensive, I decided to check this principle of chaperoning in an animal model of the disease to see if it works." Throughout experiments, the group artificially caused Parkinson's disease in animal models.

Then, the researchers performed a series of behavioral experiments in order to see if there was any sort of protective result on the animal models that were given cytisine. benefits of quitting smoking revealed that there was a protective impact both in regards to minimizing the Parkinsonian habits and also in terms of reducing the variety of dopamine neurons lost.