Parkinson's disease is a progressive intractable neurological disease that presents with motor symptoms such as tremors of limbs and gait disturbance due to a decrease in dopaminergic neurons in the brain. It is said to occur in 65 to 1% of people over the age of 2 and is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in the world, but a radical therapeutic drug that suppresses its progression has not yet been found.

　Professor Toda et al. Focused on the drug screening method developed by Professor Zuizo Okada of Osaka University in 2014.This is a method that utilizes the results of genome-wide association studies and a database of drug databases and protein-protein interactions to find new drugs that can be used for other diseases from among drugs that have already been approved for a specific disease. ) To identify new therapeutic agents.In this analysis, drugs approved for 57 other diseases were identified as potential therapeutic agents for Parkinson's disease.

　Verification in Parkinson's disease models of cultured cells and mice using the identified candidate drugs revealed that dabrafenib suppresses neurotoxicity-induced cell death and suppresses dopaminergic nerve cell death in Parkinson's disease. It has been shown that it has the potential to curb the progression of the disease.

　It takes enormous cost and time to develop a drug from scratch and put it on the market (1 billion yen per drug, 1000 years on average).Dabrafenib, an already approved drug, is expected to reduce the cost and time to clinical application.In the future, we plan to proceed with research on the most appropriate dosage and administration method for patients with Parkinson's disease.

Paper information:[Human Molecular Genetics] In silico drug screening by using genome-wide association study (GWAS)-data repurposed dabrafenib, an anti-melanoma drug, for Parkinson's disease