Technology Transfer
Development of Novel Tools for Drug Discovery:
Apoptotic and Stress-mediated Signaling as a Therapeutic Target
is a project within TEKES Drug 2000 research program
Partners:
John Eriksson, Dept. of Biology, Laboratory of Animal Physiology, University of Turku
Lea Sistonen, Turku Centre for Biotechnology, University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
George Kass, School of Biomedical & Life Sciences, University of Surrey, UK
Additional project members:
Lucy Elphic
Annika Meinander
Andrey Mikhailov
Commercial partnerships:
Galileus Ltd
Hormos Medical and Hormos Nutraceutical Ltd
Orion Ltd
The field of cell death research has undergone an explosion of new knowledge over the past decade. The realization that programmed cell death operates by highly conserved ubiquitous mechanisms in cells, and that these events are pivotal in most important pathologic processes, has focused interest on cell death research. Routine morphology based on established histological staining methods remains, even today, a major tool of apoptosis detection in clinical material and is critical for the validation of new techniques. However, inspired by the prototypical apoptotic morphology, progress has been made in elucidating the common biochemical pathways leading to the relatively uniform demise of cells in different situations such as development, injury, and normal tissue turnover. The cysteine-aspartic acid specific proteases (caspases) are activated in response to different inducers of apoptosis. The process of their activation is considered to be the key event of apoptosis, a marker of cell commitment to disassemble the machinery that supports cell life. Caspases recognize a acid sequences on their substrate proteins; the carboxyl end of aspartic acid within this sequence is the target for cleavage. Detection of caspase activation is of primary interest in methodology of early apoptosis detection. Many approaches were suggested for detection of apoptosis, and we are focusing on several of them: fluorescent substrates of caspases changing their fluorescent properties upon cleavage, reporter constructs for detection of early activation of apoptosis-associated and stress-activated genes, and the approach registering interaction between proteins by FRET upon these changes.
Background
Aims
Relevance of targets of drugs
Phosphatase inhibitors project