Legostar Galactica

Don't they already have antagonists to tackle NMDA?

Also, would the treatment attack the symptoms or the cause?

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they have plenty of NMDA antagonists, the problem is they entirely antagonize NMDA, if you block NMDA completely you loose far more than just the pain response, you lose LTP (long term potentiation) among other things. The idea is to inhibit the pain response without loss of other functions, which so far a peptide block of the Src ND2 interaction seems to be very promising. As for the cause, the actual cause of these pains aren't entirely well understood, most people who suffer from chronic pain the major symptom is that they feel pain when they really shouldn't anymore, so right now treating the symptoms goes a long way for people who are suffering immensely.

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D. M. Jeftinija Ph.D.

Trust me, I know all (well, not all, it's just an expression) about chronic neuropathic pain. Mine's apparently genetic, but also not very intense, so I won't need any treatment right now. Of course, it has the potential to get worse in 20 years or so. I'd say you have time

And what the doctor told me about NMDA antagonists was that they may cause brain damage. But that was years ago.

Anyway, what you're saying is that NMDA is just the agitator, not the cause?

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The NMDA receptor is just a receptor, it receives signals in the form of glutamate and glycine from it's environment and conducts ion currents to generate signals in neurons. it's function is essential for a variety of reasons in development and differentiation of cells as well as normal function. Also, it is important to distinguish between N-methyl-D-Aspartate (NMDA) and it's receptor. You don't really have any NMDA in your system, that's just the drug they found works on these glutamate receptors and not others and thus the name. the NMDA receptor is basically just a step along the path of the pain, a known step, as opposed to the source, and thus a place where things can be stopped if we can tease out the components essential to learning and memory from the ones transmitting pain. I've only been studying this for the last year though, and I'm not sure how much longer I will, depends on what the next lab i work in studies. I used to study Alzheimer's disease and a skeletal muscle development and differentiation. I studied NMDA receptors before that, but on the developing neuron level. My big interest is in what role astrocytes play in development and how they interact with neurons to produce results.

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D. M. Jeftinija Ph.D.

I know the difference between the amino acid and its receptor. There's just no reason to keep typing it out.

And by that 'agitator' comment I figured something may be causing the receptor to send a false signal. But I suppose I'm wrong there.

Oh well.


So you want to what, enhance the human brain? Forming new neurons is a potential way to do that.

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My apologies, not all people know to make the distinction.



forming new neurons is one way to do it, but there is a vast of amount we don't know about the interaction of neurons (which make up 10% of the brain's cells) and the rest of the brain, astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes. Astrocytes have been shown to form massive connections around synapses and interact on many levels with neurons. The research I did in undergrad working with my father centered around how you couldn't give get an NMDA response from cultured neurons if they weren't in direct physical contact with astrocytes.

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D. M. Jeftinija Ph.D.

I can only hope that your father is a scientist and not the subject.

Also, would this mean that simply increasing the amount of neurons doesn't guarantee improvement? Because I recall a drug being developed for activating neural stem cells with the intention of growing new neurons.

(And, yes, plenty of potential discoveries left in the field. But I suppose that's really true for every scientific field, just not many have such obvious gaps)

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the idea in prompting the development of neurons from neural stem cells is to replace neurons that have been lost due to damage or disease. growing more in a healthy system is not really useful, in fact it's a bit of a side effect, creation of tumors. a healthy brain has all the neurons that it needs, most of the memory changes and improvements in function tend to be through new pathways formed by existing neurons, now in a normal process neurons do die and get replaced, the same is true with astrocytes and other cells, but sometimes things don't go well. And yes, my father is a scientist, he and I are in the same field, Neuroscience apparently runs in the family.

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D. M. Jeftinija Ph.D.

Well isn't that the understatement of the century?


But neurons do need to rest after firing. I'm not sure how much of an impact that makes, but the idea would be increasing the capacity of the pathways that already exist. That is if you can precisely integrate the neurons in the first place.

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it's actually quite impressive the train of action potentials you can induce in a neuron, they can fire very rapidly without any sort of "rest" in some cases.

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D. M. Jeftinija Ph.D.