Researchers have discovered a platelet protein that could help develop new drugs to prevent clotting, leading to strokes and heart attacks.
Platelets play a bitter sweet role in the human circulatory system. Without them, even a small cut can lead to fatal bleeding and during a heart stroke, they create a clot that potentially blocks blood flow through our veins and arteries, which can deprive tissues of oxygen and lead to death. This clotting condition is known as thrombosis.
There are many drugs available in the market that claim to treat this condition but most of them are found to cause bleeding. This gets pretty troublesome, especially when patients with the condition undergo surgery.
"There's still room for improvement, in terms of making an ideal drug that can block platelet function without initiating bleeding," said Dr. Stephen Holly, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University Of North Carolina School Of Medicine in a press statement.
In a new research, Dr. Holly and his team were able to uncover a key platelet protein that could help them develop new drugs to prevent clotting.
For the study, researchers used a screening technique called activity-based protein profiling, used in cancer researchers to track the actual activities of proteins operating within a cell. This technique has never been used on the cardiovascular system. However, for this study, researchers used the technique to discover several potential drug targets. Platelets were first pre-screened to narrow the field of drug-like compounds. These compounds were then used to find proteins that played a role in platelet activation.
"Using this technique, we discovered both novel inhibitors of platelet activation and a novel enzyme involved in platelet signaling," said Holly. "I think we're at the start of an exciting journey of drug discovery for a new class of antithrombotic therapies.
Researchers found that these platelets had natural "on-off" switches and understanding how these switches work can help develop drugs that keep platelets from forming pathological blood clots. The authors of the research hope to conduct further studies on the proteins' roles in animal models before potentially pursuing clinical trials in humans.
According to a CDC report, the precise number of people with thrombosis in the United States is yet to be determined though an estimation runs between 300,000 to 600,000 each year. The number is approximately 1 or 2 in every 1,000 adults and goes up to 1 in every 100 for adults aged above 80. The report reveals that approximately 10 to 30 percent of patients with thrombosis die within one month of diagnosis, many of which (25 percent) are sudden deaths.
