Newswise — In the December 2018 issue of SLAS Discovery, researchers from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) explore recent developments and strategies for targeting the NLRP3 inflammasome as a potential therapeutic target in acute and chronic neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, and offer perspective on how this field may develop in the future.
The progression and development of both acute and chronic neurological and neurodegenerative conditions, such as stroke or Alzheimer’s disease, are now recognized to involve the host inflammatory response. That is to say, a body’s own immune system reacts to the disease, but ultimately makes things worse, not better. Recent research now suggests that a specific component of the inflammatory response may be largely responsible for the worsening of disease. Inflammatory cells in the brain, called microglia, contain a protein called NLRP3. The job of NLRP3 is to sense for alterations in cellular homeostasis, and when the cell is sufficiently perturbed, NLRP3 undergoes an oligomerisation process with other proteins in the cell to form a macromolecular complex inside the cell called the inflammasome. Once active, the inflammasome complex catalyses activation and secretion of pro-inflammatory molecules that then cause inflammation in the tissue environment. In the brain this is devastating.
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“Is Targeting the Inflammasome a Way Forward for Neuroscience Drug Discovery?” can be accessed for free for limited time from http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jbxb/23/10. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/journals.
A PDF of this article is available to credentialed media outlets upon request. Contact [email protected].
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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of nearly 20,000 professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.
SLAS DISCOVERY: 2017 Impact Factor 2.355. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN (USA). SLAS Discovery (Advancing Life Sciences R&D) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS).
SLAS TECHNOLOGY: 2017 Impact Factor 2.632. Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D., National University of Singapore (Singapore). SLAS Technology (Translating Life Sciences Innovation) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA).
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