A common anti-diarrhoea drug an ideal candidate for treating symptoms of autism

This is loperamide, selected after a protein interaction analysis At this time there is no drug currently approved for the treatment of social communication deficits, the main symptom of ASD The antipsychotic drugs that are commonly used have serious side effects or lack of Efficacy, Authors of New Study SayResearchers have found that a common antidiarrheal drug may have potential to treat social difficulties associated with ASD, they report in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology. They used a computer model that encompasses the proteins involved in ASD and how they interact. By looking at how different drugs affected proteins in the system, they identified possible candidates to treat it. A commonly used antidiarrheal drug called loperamide was the most promising candidate, and the researchers have an interesting hypothesis about how it might work to treat ASD symptoms. Difficulties with social interaction and communication are some of the most common symptoms of ASD. “There is no medication currently approved for the treatment of social communication deficits, the main symptom of ASD,” says Dr. Elise Koch of the University Oslo, Norway, and lead author of the study– However, most adults and about half of children and adolescents with ASD are treated with antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects or lack efficacy in ASD “In an effort to find a new way to treat ASD, researchers turned to drug repurposing, which involves exploring existing drugs as potential treatments for a different disease. This approach has many advantages, since extensive knowledge is often available about existing drugs in terms of their safety, their side effects, and the biological molecules with which they interact in the body. To identify new treatments for ASD, researchers used a computer-based protein interaction network. These networks encompass proteins and the complex interactions between them. This complexity is important to keep in mind when studying biological systems, because affecting one protein can often have knock-on effects elsewhere, they say. The researchers built a protein-interaction network that included ASD-associated proteins . By investigating existing drugs and their interaction with network proteins, the team identified several candidates that counteract the biological process underlying ASD. The most promising drug is called loperamide, which is commonly used for diarrhoea. Although it may seem strange that an antidiarrheal drug could treat the core symptoms of ASD, researchers have developed a hypothesis about how it works. Loperamide binds to and activates a protein that is normally affected by opioid drugs, such as morphine. In addition to the effects normally expected of an opioid drug, such as pain relief, the receptor also affects social behavior. In previous studies, genetically modified mice lacking the u-opioid receptor showed social deficits similar to those seen in the TEA. Interestingly, drugs that activate the receptor helped restore social behaviors. These results in mice highlight the tantalizing possibility that loperamide, or other receptor-targeted drugs, may represent a new way to treat social symptoms present in the brain. TEA, but more work is needed to test this hypothesis. In any case, the current study demonstrates the power of assuming that old drugs can indeed learn new tricks.