We believe that a combination of informed, targeted and unbiased drug screening is necessary to devise strategies to normalize water balance disorders, including nephrogenic diabetes insipidus and hyponatremia. The overall strategy proposed in this renewal application is designed to facilitate this goal. Over the past three years of funding, we have uncovered several important and previously unrecognized aspects of aquaporin 2 biology: 1) AQP2 catalyzes actin depolymerization in response to AVP: 2) AQP2 trafficking to the apical membrane involves transient basolateral insertion and redirection via transcytosis: 3) AQP2 recycles constitutively in the complete absence of any known phosphorylation events.
Aim 1 takes advantage of this new knowledge and interrogates the relationship between AQP2 phosphorylation, actin organization, and the polarity of AQP2 membrane delivery and accumulation in renal epithelial cells. This approach allows us to envisage more informed approaches to water balance disorders. Next, our use of high throughput chemical screening in the previous funding cycle led us to discover that the FDA approved cancer drug Erlotinib, an EGFR inhibitor, reduces urine output by 50% in lithium treated NDI mice.
Aim 2 will explore the mechanism by which EGFR inhibition alone, in the complete absence of VP, causes AQP2 phosphorylation and membrane accumulation in the absence of PKA stimulation. We need to identify which signaling pathway is responsible in order to fully understand how Erlotinib works in this setting, and to suggest alternative targeted approaches. Finally, our quest for additional new compounds that modulate AQP2 membrane accumulation will continue in Aim 3, in which a fluorescence assay will be used for unbiased screening of chemical libraries for inhibitors or stimulators of endocytosis. While endocytosis inhibitors are candidates for use in NDI, specific stimulators of AQP2 endocytosis could be useful in conditions of water overload that could lead to hyponatremia and even hypertension. We will also test exocytosis-inhibitor compounds that were identified in our previous screen for their ability to prevent AQP2 membrane accumulation, also a feature of drugs that would prevent water overloading. Our prior studies and the work proposed in this renewal application range from the in vitro characterization of protein interactions, through cell culture assays, to whole animal studies. We have developed new cell lines for high throughput chemical screens, a new AQP2-EGFP construct for live cell imaging, and we have a newly-established colony of conditional vasopressin receptor knockout mice in our facility for in vivo drug testing. Our work combines the need for a better understanding of basic mechanisms in order to drive translational medicine and clinical advances, with a more direct drug discovery approach using novel cell assays.
The kidney controls how much of our daily salt and water intake is reabsorbed back into the body and how much is released as urine. Sometimes this process is not balanced, leading to diseases such as hypertension (too much fluid and sodium in the body) and dehydration (too much urine production). Our work is aimed at finding mechanisms that cause these diseases in order to develop drugs to cure them.
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