The current two pronged research effort on the possible use of Gemfibrozil (Lopid) to treat Alzheimer’s disease now has far wider implications than Alzheimer’s disease alone. As far as I’m aware, the combination of mechanisms described below to control a cellular pathway as never been reported before.
A previous post has the story up to 3 August — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/takes-me-right-back-to-grad-school/ — you can read it for the details, but here’s some background and the rest of the story.
Background: One of the two pathologic hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the senile plaque (the other is the neurofibrillary tangle). The major component of the plaque is a fragment of a protein called APP (Amyloid Precursor Protein). Normally it sits in the cellular membrane of nerve cells (neurons) with part sticking outside the cell and another part sticking inside. The protein as made by the cell contains anywhere from 563 to 770 amino acids linked together in a long chain. The fragment destined to make up the senile plaque (called the Abeta peptide) is much smaller (39 to 42 amino acids) and is found in the parts of APP embedded in the membrane and sticking outside the cell.
No protein lives forever in the cell, and APP is no exception. There are a variety of ways to chop it up, so its amino acids can be used for other things. One such chopper is called ADAM10 (aka Kuzbanian). ADAM10breaks down APP in such a way that Abeta isn’t formed. A paper in the 7 July PNAS (vol. 112 pp. 8445 – 8450 ’15 7 July ’15) essentially found that Gemfibrozil (commercial name Lopid) increases the amount of ADAM10 around. If you take a mouse genetically modified so that it will get senile plaques and decrease ADAM10 you get a lot more plaques.
I wrote the author (Dr. Pahan) to ask how they came up with Gemfibrozil (Lopid). He told me that a transcription factor (PPARalpha) helps transcribe the ADAM10 gene into mRNA, and that Gemfibrozil makes PPARalpha a better transcription factor.
I told him to datamine from HMOs to find out if people on Lopid had less Alzheimer’s, he said it would be hard to get such as grant to do this as a basic researcher.
A commenter on the first post gave me a name to contact to try out the idea, but I’ve been unable to reach her. So on 3 August, I wrote an Alzheimer’s researcher at Yale about it. He responded nearly immediately with a link to an ongoing clinical study in progress in Kentucky, actually using Gemfibrozil.
Both researchers (Dr. Jicha and Nelson) were extremely helpful and cooperative. What is so fascinating is that they got to Gemfibrozil by an entirely different route. There are degrees of Alzheimer’s disease, and there is a pathologic grading scheme for it. They studied postmortem brain of 4 classes of individuals — normal nondemented elderly with minimal plaque, non demented elderly with incipient plaque, mild cognitive impairment and full flown Alzheimer’s. They had studied the microRNA #107 (miR-107) in another context. Why this one of the thousand or so microRNAs in the human genome? Because it binds to the mRNA of BACE1 and prevents it from being made. Why is this good? Because BACE1 chops up APP at a different site so the Abeta peptide is formed.
How did Gemfibrozil get into the act? Just as Dr. Pahan did, they looked to see what transcription factors were involved in making miR-107, and found PPARalpha. So to make less BACE1 they give people Gemfibrozil which turns on PPARalpha which turns on miR-107, which causes the mRNA for BACE1 to be destroyed, hopefully making less Abeta. The study is in progress and will last a year, far too short with far too few people to see a meaningful cognitive effect, but not so short that they won’t see changes in the biologic markers they are studying in the spinal fluids (yes 72 plucky individuals have agreed to take Gemfibrozil (or not) and have two spinal taps one year apart.
The elegance of all this is simply astounding. A single transcription factor –PPARalpha turns on a gene for a chopper — ADAM10 (aka Kuzbanian) which chops up APP so that the toxic Abeta isoform is not made. Amazingly, PPARalpha also turns on a microRNA (miR-107 ) which decreases the amount of a different APP chopper (BACE1) which produces toxic Abeta from APP, so that less toxic Abeta peptide is formed.
So there’s a whole research program for you. Take a given transcription factor, look at the protein genes it turns on. Then look at the microRNA genes it turns on and then see what protein mRNAs they turn off. Then see they affect the same biochemical pathway as do ADAM10 and BACE1.
The mechanism is so elegant (although hardly simple) that I’ll bet the cell uses it again, in completely different pathways.
One problem with PPARalpha is that it is said to affect HUNDREDS of genes (Mol. Metab vol. 3 pp. 354 371 ’14). So Gemfibrozil is a nice story, but even if it works, we won’t really be sure it’s doing so by ADAM10 and microRNA-107.
Chemiotics II 