This is the first competitive renewal following R29 funding to investigate the mechanisms of amyloid disease. The long term goals of this research program are to understand the biochemical mechanism of human amyloid disease and develop new therapeutic strategies to test hypotheses about the etiology of these diseases. The common features of human amyloid disease involve the extracellular deposition of proteins in a fiber morphology. Significant circumstantial evidence suggests that fibrils directly cause the neuropathology of the brain associated diseases and this concept has been generalized as the """"""""amyloid hypothesis"""""""". This outstanding young investigator focuses his proposal on two amyloid diseases that do not directly involve the brain. These are familial amyloid polyneuropathy and senile systemic amyloidosis. In the familial disease, a mutated form transthyretin (prealbumin) (TTR) is deposited as fibrils in peripheral nerves or in specific organs while in the senile form of the disease normal TTR forms primarily in cardiac tissue. These diseases were chosen in order to test the general amyloid hypothesis by utilizing small molecules that can inhibit TTR amyloid fibril formation to directly assess whether inhibition of transthyretin fibril formation is sufficient to prevent the onset of amyloid disease. The first specific aim of this proposal is centered around further testing the conformational change hypothesis, which suggests that tertiary structural changes are involved to make a given protein amyloidogenic. From prior work, it was shown that TTR amyloid fibril formation results from the self-assembly of an alternative tertiary structure of the protein. This result will be extended with continued funding to apply numerous biophysical methods including mass spectrometry and NMR to precisely determine the structure of the wild type amyloidogenic intermediate, and to compare this structure to the familial amyloid polyneuropathy associated variants of transthyretin (TTR). Previous work during the past funding period has shown that these TTR variants are much less stable and denature a thousand fold faster than wild-type TTR. Under continued support, Dr. Kelly will investigate tetramers composed of mixed wild-type and familial variants to assess their stability, rates of pH mediated denaturation and amyloidogenicity.
The second aim i nvolves a structure-based drug design strategy utilizing the synergistic application of x-ray crystallography, organic synthesis and parallel screening in order to identify high affinity binding amyloid inhibitors that stabilize the native state of TTR and prevent the pH mediated conformational changes that result in fibril formation.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DK046335-10
Application #
6380781
Study Section
Molecular and Cellular Biophysics Study Section (BBCA)
Program Officer
Mckeon, Catherine T
Project Start
1993-05-01
Project End
2002-06-30
Budget Start
2001-07-01
Budget End
2002-06-30
Support Year
10
Fiscal Year
2001
Total Cost
$278,313
Indirect Cost
Name
Scripps Research Institute
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
La Jolla
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92037
Monteiro, Cecilia; Martins da Silva, Ana; Ferreira, Natália et al. (2018) Cerebrospinal fluid and vitreous body exposure to orally administered tafamidis in hereditary ATTRV30M (p.TTRV50M) amyloidosis patients. Amyloid 25:120-128
Buxbaum, Joel N; Morgan, Gareth J (2018) Summary: FASEB Science Research Conference on Protein Aggregation in Health and Disease. FASEB J 32:1125-1129
Rennella, Enrico; Morgan, Gareth J; Kelly, Jeffery W et al. (2018) Role of domain interactions in the aggregation of full-length immunoglobulin light chains. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A :
Mortenson, David E; Brighty, Gabriel J; Plate, Lars et al. (2018) ""Inverse Drug Discovery"" Strategy To Identify Proteins That Are Targeted by Latent Electrophiles As Exemplified by Aryl Fluorosulfates. J Am Chem Soc 140:200-210
Sperry, Brett W; Reyes, Bryan A; Ikram, Asad et al. (2018) Tenosynovial and Cardiac Amyloidosis in Patients Undergoing Carpal Tunnel Release. J Am Coll Cardiol 72:2040-2050
Lampkin, Bryan J; Monteiro, Cecilia; Powers, Evan T et al. (2018) A designed protein binding-pocket to control excited-state intramolecular proton transfer fluorescence. Org Biomol Chem :
Madhivanan, Kayalvizhi; Greiner, Erin R; Alves-Ferreira, Miguel et al. (2018) Cellular clearance of circulating transthyretin decreases cell-nonautonomous proteotoxicity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115:E7710-E7719
Leach, Benjamin I; Zhang, Xin; Kelly, Jeffery W et al. (2018) NMR Measurements Reveal the Structural Basis of Transthyretin Destabilization by Pathogenic Mutations. Biochemistry 57:4421-4430
Chen, Kai-Chun; Qu, Song; Chowdhury, Saikat et al. (2017) The endoplasmic reticulum HSP40 co-chaperone ERdj3/DNAJB11 assembles and functions as a tetramer. EMBO J 36:2296-2309
Schonhoft, Joseph D; Monteiro, Cecilia; Plate, Lars et al. (2017) Peptide probes detect misfolded transthyretin oligomers in plasma of hereditary amyloidosis patients. Sci Transl Med 9:

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