“How bee poison could help medications reach the brain”
High impact in the international media of Ernest Giralt's latest work presented at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. Giralt, head of the Design, Synthesis and Structure of Peptides and Proteins Lab at IRB Barcelona, is working on transforming a protein from bee venom into a tool that helps treatments get inside the brain.
“We thought that because the venoms of some animals are able to attack the central nervous system, they should be able to go through the blood-brain barrier and possibly shuttle drugs across it," explains Giralt.
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La Sexta and Agencia Sinc, among other media, have published an article on the recent study by IRB Barcelona, led by ICREA researcher Lluís Ribas, who has discovered a mechanism that evolved in eukaryotic cells and that facilitates the synthesis of proteins, such as those present in the extracellular matrix. Of note, some of these proteins are highly relevant in biomedicine because of their link with diseases and greater knowledge of these molecules may bring about the development of strategies to inhibit their production, according to the authors.
The study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, has been headed by Lluís Ribas, at IRB Barcelona.
For the scientific community, the protein POP (prolyl oligopeptidase) is an attractive therapeutic target for the treatment of cognitive and neurodegenerative disorders.
Scientists at IRB Barcelona have developed the first POP inhibitors that are irreversible, selective and brain-permeable.
