Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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cyclooxygenase 2

COX-2 and epilepsy: it’s complicated

How much is the development of epilepsy like arthritis?

More than you might expect. Inflammation, or the overactivation of the immune system, appears to be involved in both. In addition, for both diseases, inhibiting the enzyme COX-2 initially looked like a promising approach.

Ray Dingledine, PhD

COX-2 (cyclooxygenase 2) is a target of traditional non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen, as well as more selective drugs such as Celebrex. With arthritis, selectively inhibiting COX-2 relieves pain and inflammation, but turns out to have the side effect of increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke.

In the development of epilepsy, inhibiting COX-2 turns out to be complicated as well. Ray Dingledine, chair of pharmacology at Emory, and colleagues have a new paper showing that COX-2 has both protective and harmful effects in mice after status epilepticus, depending on the timing and what cells the enzyme comes from. Status epilepticus is a period of continuous seizures leading to neurodegeneration, used as a model for the development of epilepsy.

Postdoc Geidy Serrano, now at the Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Arizona, is first author of the paper in Journal of Neuroscience. She and Dingledine were able to dissect COX-2’s effects because they engineered mice to have a deletion of the COX-2 gene, but only in some parts of the brain.
They show that deleting COX-2 in the brain reduces the level of inflammatory molecules produced by neurons, but this is the reverse effect of deleting it all over the body or inhibiting the enzyme with drugs.

Four days after status epilepticus, fewer neurons are damaged (bright green) in the neuronal COX-2 knockout mice.

Dingledine identified two take-home messages from the paper:
First, COX-2 itself is probably not a good target for antiepileptic therapy, and it may be better to go downstream, to prostaglandin receptors like EP2.
Second, the timing of intervention will be important, because the same enzyme has opposing actions a few hours after status epilepticus compared to a couple days later.

More of Dingledine’s thinking about inflammation in the development of epilepsy can be found in a recent review.

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment