PLA2G6, encoding a phospholipase A2, is mutated in neurodegenerative disorders with high brain iron

Neurodegenerative disorders with high brain iron include Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease and several childhood genetic disorders categorized as neuroaxonal dystrophies. We mapped a locus for infantile neuroaxonal dystrophy (INAD) and neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation (NBIA) to chromosome 22q12-q13 and identified mutations in PLA2G6, encoding a calcium-independent group VI phospholipase A2, in NBIA, INAD and the related Karak syndrome. This discovery implicates phospholipases in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders with iron dyshomeostasis.     

Large-scale prediction and testing of drug activity on side-effect targets

Discovering the unintended 'off-targets' that predict adverse drug reactions is daunting by empirical methods alone. Drugs can act on several protein targets, some of which can be unrelated by conventional molecular metrics, and hundreds of proteins have been implicated in side effects. Here we use a computational strategy to predict the activity of 656 marketed drugs on 73 unintended 'side-effect' targets. Approximately half of the predictions were confirmed, either from proprietary databases unknown to the method or by new experimental assays. Affinities for these new off-targets ranged from 1 nM to 30 μM. To explore relevance, we developed an association metric to prioritize those new off-targets that explained side effects better than any known target of a given drug, creating a drug-target-adverse drug reaction network. Among these new associations was the prediction that the abdominal pain side effect of the synthetic oestrogen chlorotrianisene was mediated through its newly discovered inhibition of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-1. The clinical relevance of this inhibition was borne out in whole human blood platelet aggregation assays. This approach may have wide application to de-risking toxicological liabilities in drug discovery.     

Diabetes in transgenic mice resulting from over-expression of class I histocompatibility molecules in pancreatic beta cells

A class I histocompatibility gene, H-2Kb, linked to the rat insulin promoter, is overexpressed in the pancreatic beta cells of transgenic mice. The mice, whether syngeneic or allogeneic to the transgene, develop insulin dependent diabetes without detectable T cell infiltration, suggesting a direct, non-immune role for the transgenic class I molecules in the disease process.