Tag Archives: Maria Kiskowski

The Danes get more from their marijuana

A Sept. 8, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily features work at the University of Copenhagen where scientists are researching a new method for reducing consumption of drugs such as adrenaline and cannabis when used therapeutically,

About 40% of all medicines used today work through the so-called “G protein-coupled receptors.” These receptors react to changes in the cell environment, for example, to increased amounts of chemicals like cannabis, adrenaline or the medications we take and are therefore of paramount importance to the pharmaceutical industry.

“There is a lot of attention on research into “G protein-coupled receptors,” because they have a key roll in recognizing and binding different substances. Our new method is of interest to the industry because it can contribute to faster and cheaper drug development,” explains Professor Dimitrios Stamou, who heads the Nanomedicine research group at the Nano-Science Center, where the method has been developed. …

A Sept. 8, 2014 University of Copenhagen news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides a little more detail,

The new method will reduce dramatically the use of precious membrane protein samples. Traditionally, you test a medicinal substance by using small drops of a sample containing the protein that the medicine binds to. If you look closely enough however, each drop is composed of thousands of billions of small nano-containers containing the isolated proteins. Until now, it has been assumed that all of these nano-containers are identical. But it turns out this is not the case and that is why researchers can use a billion times smaller samples for testing drug candidates than hitherto.

“We have discovered that each one of the countless nano-containers is unique. Our method allows us to collect information about each individual nano-container. We can use this information to construct high-throughput screens, where you can, for example, test how medicinal drugs bind G protein-coupled receptors”, explains Signe Mathiasen, who is first author of the paper describing the screening method in Nature Methods. Signe Mathiasen has worked on developing a screening method over the last four years at the University of Copenhagen, where she wrote her PhD thesis research project under the supervision of Professor Stamou.

Although the title doesn’t betray its marijuana orientation, this is a link to and a citation for the researchers’ work,

Nanoscale high-content analysis using compositional heterogeneities of single proteoliposomes by Signe Mathiasen, Sune M Christensen, Juan José Fung, Søren G F Rasmussen, Jonathan F Fay, Sune K Jorgensen, Salome Veshaguri, David L Farrens, Maria Kiskowski, Brian Kobilka, & Dimitrios Stamou. Nature Methods 11, 931–934 (2014) doi:10.1038/nmeth.3062 Published online 03 August 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.