The meningococcus can kill you within 12 hours after the spots appear — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterhouse–Friderichsen_syndrome. Who would have thought that it would be teaching us neuropharmacology. But it is — showing us how to make a new class of drugs, that no one has ever thought of.
One of the most important ways that the outside of a cell tells the inside what’s going on and what to do is the GPCR (acronym for G Protein Coupled Receptor). Our 20,000 protein coding genome contains 826 of them. 108 G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the targets of 475 Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs (slightly over 1/3). GPCRs are embedded in the outer membrane of the cell, with the protein going back and forth through the membrane 7 times (transmembrane segment 1 to 7 (TM1 – TM7). As the GPCR sits there usually the 7 TMs cluster together, and signaling molecules such as norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin etc. etc. bind to the center of the cluster. This is where the 475 drugs try to modify things.
Not so the meningococcus. It binds to the beta2 adrenergic receptor on the surface of brain endothelial cells lining cerebral blood vessels, turning on a signaling cascade which eventually promotes opening junctions of the brain endothelial cells with each other, so the bug can get into the brain. All sorts of drugs are used to affect beta2 adrenergic receptors, in particular drugs for asthma which activate the receptor causing lung smooth muscle to relax. All of them are small molecules which bind within the 7 TM cluster.
According to Nature Commun. vol 10 pp. 4752 –> ’19, the little hairs (pili) on the outside of the organism bind to sugars attached to the extracellular surface of the receptor, pulling on it activating the receptor.
This a completely new mechanism to alter GPCR function (which, after all, is what our drugs are trying to do). This means that we potentially have a whole new class of drugs, and 826 juicy targets to explore them with.
Here is one clinical experience I had with the meningococcus. A middle aged man presented with headache, stiff neck and fever. Normally spinal fluid is as clear as water. This man’s was cloudy, a very bad sign as it usually means pus (lots of white blood cells). I started the standard antibiotic (at the time) for bacterial meningitis — because you don’t wait for the culture to come back which back then took two days. The lab report showed no white cells, which I thought was screwy, so I went down to the lab to look for myself — there weren’t any. The cloudiness was due to a huge number of meningococcal bacteria. I though he was a goner, but amazingly he survived and went home. Unfortunately his immune system was quite abnormal, and the meningitis was the initial presentation of multiple myeloma.
Chemiotics II 