What is it about?
Benzodiazepines, used to treat anxiety disorders, act in the brain increasing the activity of GABAA receptors. They also act indirectly, by activating proteins in mitochondria which in turn lead to the production of substances called neurosteroids. We show, for the first time, that FGIN-1-28, a drug which acts in this second pathway, but not directly on GABAA receptors, has anti-anxiety and anti-panic effects on zebrafish and lizard models. These alternative models also showed that FGIN-1-28 has less side effects than diazepam, the most widely used benzodiazepine.
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Why is it important?
Our findings in alternative, non-mammalian models show that the effects of drugs which act on the mitochondrial benzodiazepine receptor are conserved across species. These results also suggest that such drugs could be better therapies for anxiety disorders in human patients.
Perspectives
In addition to the interesting findings that we produced in our first Brazil-Mexico collaboration, this article also represented a consolidation, for us, of practices which include reproducibility, including sharing preprints (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/19/056507) and data and analysis scripts (https://github.com/lanec-unifesspa/fgin-1-27)
Dr. Caio Maximino
Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Para
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: FGIN-1-27, an agonist at translocator protein 18 kDa (TSPO), produces anti-anxiety and anti-panic effects in non-mammalian models, Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, August 2018, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.pbb.2018.04.007.
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