Lithium's Mode of Action: Genetic Etiology and Drug Disovery in Bipolar Disorder

描述（由申请人提供）：双相情感障碍（BD）是一种高度遗传性的神经行为障碍，影响全球约1%的人口，是当今世界上导致死亡和残疾的最重要原因之一。锂在1949年首次被用于治疗躁狂症，在过去的30年里一直是双相情感障碍的主要治疗方法，被证明对多达50%的治疗病例有效。然而，尽管锂证明了疗效，但至少有一半的病例对治疗没有积极反应，毒性是一个关键问题，需要对患者的几种生物学参数进行常规监测。现有的几种替代疗法，如丙戊酸钠，在临床环境或比较试验中并没有提高成功率。尽管经过数十年的协同研究，锂的功效模式仍然未知。基因组学和化学领域的最新技术和概念发展为药物发现提供了强有力的方法，这些方法有可能从根本上改善目标识别、化合物发现和药物开发的过程。在目前的研究中，我们建议应用化学基因组学来阐明锂的治疗作用模式，并发现治疗双相障碍的新化合物。这项工作将利用新兴的方法，包括表达特征的定义，基于细胞的化学文库的高通量筛选，以概括这些特征。然后用形态学和其他细胞分析方法对小分子引线进行表征。我们假设，在celllo中，靶向分子途径的定义将确定介导锂功效的主要细胞过程，并分离出具有高合理药物开发潜力的化合物。值得注意的是，锂的作用模式的任何解析都可能表明常见疾病状态的分子病因的遗传途径。虽然我们打算描述锂靶向的分子途径和由此产生的细胞效应，但该提议的一个驱动焦点是快速识别具有开发治疗药物和高度特异性试剂的潜力的新化合物，用于实验解剖与精神疾病相关的途径。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Bipolar disorder (BD) is a highly heritable neurobehavioral disorder that affects ~1 % of the global population and constitutes one of the most significant causes of death and disability in the world today. Lithium was first used to treat mania in 1949 and has remained the mainstay treatment of Bipolar disorder for the last 30 years, proving effective for as many as -50% of treated cases. However, despite lithium's demonstrated efficacy, at least half of cases do not respond positively to treatment, and toxicity is a critical concern requiring routine monitoring of several biological parameters in patients. The few alternative treatments that exist, such as Valproate, do not present improved success rates in clinical settings or comparative trials. Despite decades of concerted research, lithium's mode of efficacy remains unknown. Recent technological and conceptual developments in genomics and chemistry currently enable powerful approaches to drug discovery that have the potential to radically improve the processes of target identification, compound discovery, and drug development. In the present study, we propose the application of chemical genomics to the elucidation of lithium's therapeutic mode of action and the discovery of novel compounds for the treatment of BD. The effort will take advantage of emerging methodologies entailing the definition of expression signatures, high-throughput screening of chemical libraries in cell-based assays to recapitulate those signatures, followed by characterization of small molecule leads using morphological and other cellular assays. We hypothesize that in cellulo definition of targeted molecular pathways will identify the primary cellular processes that mediate lithium's efficacy and isolate compounds with high rational potential for drug development. Notably, any resolution of lithium's mode of action will likely indicate genetic pathways underlying the molecular etiology of the common disease state. While we intend to delineate the molecular pathways targeted by lithium and the resultant cellular effects, a driving focus of this proposal is the rapid identification of novel compounds with the potential for development of therapeutic drugs and highly specific reagents for experimental dissection of pathways relevant to psychiatric disorders.