Recent clinical studies reveal that agents that activate muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) have robust efficacy in reducing psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia as well as AD and other neurodegenerative disorders. Evidence suggests that the antipsychotic effects of cholinergic agents may be mediated by the M1 mAChR subtype. However, previous compounds developed to selectively activate M1 receptors lack true specificity for M1. This has resulted in problems with adverse effects due to M2 and M3 activation in patients and has made it impossible to definitively determine whether the behavioral and clinical effects of these compounds are mediated by M1 or other mAChR subtypes. Despite major efforts by multiple industry and academic laboratories, it has been impossible to develop clinically useful highly selective M1 agonists that act the orthosteric acetylcholine (ACh) binding site. This is likely due to the high degree of conservation of the ACh site between mAChR subtypes. In recent years we have been highly successful in establishing a new class of compounds that act as allosteric potentiators of G protein-coupled receptors that may provide key advantages to direct-acting agonists. Unlike agonists, these compounds do not directly activate the receptor but act at an allosteric site to potentiate the response to the endogenous agonist. In general, these compounds tend to be more selective for the intended receptor because they do not interact with the highly conserved neurotransmitter binding site. Another major breakthrough occurred when other laboratories discovered a novel class of M1 agonists that interact with an ectopic site on the receptor rather than the ACh binding site. Unlike traditional agonists, these compounds are highly specific for M1 relative to other mAChR subtypes and provide exciting new tools to definitively determine whether the physiological and behavioral effects of mAChR agonists thought to be important for antipsychotic activity are mediated by M1. In the proposed studies, we will take advantage of automated technologies and a high throughput screen for allosteric potentiators of M1 that we have developed to identify novel compounds that act as highly selective allosteric potentiators of this receptor. In addition, we will use these compounds along with the new selective ectopic site M1 agonists, a novel M4 allosteric potentiator and a panel of mice in which specific mAChR subtypes have been deleted to test the hypothesis that the antipsychotic-like profile of muscarinic agonists is mediated by M1 and to determine whether allosteric potentiators of M1 have electrophysiological and behavioral effects that are similar to those of M1 agonists.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 70 publications
