Height evil is one of the problems that professional mountaineers and occasional visitors who decide to ascend to certain altitudes must face. This disorder is related to the lack of oxygen, hypoxia, which occurs in these environments, but now a pharmaceutical company wants to turn it around.
Turn that “evil” into a “good.”
HypoxyStat. Transforming the mountain air, or rather, the absence of air of the mountain, in a pill is the proposal of the Gladstone Institute and Maze Therapeutics laboratories. The new drug has received the name Hypoxystat and its goal is to fight against metabolic disorders such as Leigh Syndrome.
Mountain air. It might seem crazy idea, but reducing the amount of oxygen that enters our body can make sense in certain senses beyond high performance sport. Living in a mountainous area can benefit people with Leight syndrome, a mitochondrial disease that affects childhood.
This disorder occurs when the mitochondria, the organelle in charge of feeding the rest of the cell is not able to consume all the oxygen it receives. This leads to a dangerous accumulation of oxygen that ends with cells and tissues and, ultimately, with the patient’s life.
“It is not practical for each patient with this disease to move to the mountains,” Isha Jain explains in a press release, who has led the recent study of the drug. “But this drug could be a controlled and safe way to apply the same benefits to patients.”
2016. Almost a decade ago, a team, in which Jain herself participated, discovered that mice with this syndrome responded well when they were exposed to air with a lower amount of oxygen, the equivalent of that which can be found at heights of 4,500 meters (a upper altitude in almost a kilometer to the Teide peak). The lack of oxygen caused it to stop accumulating in the cells.
The new compound could achieve a similar effect in a different way: focusing on hemoglobin, the molecule that transports oxygen in our blood. The new compound causes oxygen to be linked more easily to hemoglobin which may sound contraintuitive, they explain. However, this fact also makes it difficult for the molecule to deliver oxygen to the cells of our body.
Concept test. The new drug has been developed Maze Therapeutics to fight anemia. The Gladstone Institute team, from the University of California San Francisco, found the substance when looking for a compound capable of reinforcing the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. As a treatment, Hypoxystat is still in early development, but has already begun to succeed in mice.
The details of these tests have been published recently in an article in the magazine Cell.
Promising results. Although for now the studies are limited to rodents, they invite cautious optimism. The team observed, for example, that the compound had therapeutic capacity both in cases where it was administered before the appearance of symptoms and in cases where mice were already in advanced stages of the disease.
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