Scientists’ discovery may prevent stroke

After almost four years of research, a team of scientists from UCF and Louisiana State University has discovered a way to guard against cell death that causes brain damage during a stroke.

UCF assistant professor Sic Chan, a collaborator on the project, said the team focused on the mechanics of the glutamate neurotransmitter because it is critical in the brain development of adults and is involved in most aspects of normal brain function.

A stroke occurs when blood flow to the brain is interrupted by a blocked artery or broken blood vessel.

It is the third-leading cause of death in the United States, according to the National Stroke Association Web site.

"During a stroke, the glutamate becomes abundant outside the nervous system and is released at high levels," Chan said.  "The NMDA receptors [that regulate the entry of calcium into the nerve cells] will lead to over-stimulation, and that can lead to too much calcium influx, or calcium overload. Calcium overload is bad for the cells."

The research team discovered that they could protect brain cells against stroke injury in lab mice by injecting them with a powerful compound that blocked death-associated protein kinase 1, the enzyme that signals cell death by attaching to NMDA receptors.

It could take 10 or more years before the compound becomes approved for use on humans though, Chan said.

"It involves a lot of money and resources, obviously," he said. "Once a compound has been found in a laboratory setting, to move ahead, pharmaceutical companies will need to come in and help take it to the final stages."

The team's findings have been featured on a number of medical Web sites and were published in Cell, one of the leading biomedical journals in the world.

"We are publishing quite a bit in Orlando, as far as I know," Chan said. "So with everything we're doing, we're attracting future collaborators."

Ph.D. candidate and biomedical sciences major Cherine Belal was also on the research team and said that the experience was very exciting for her.

"It was amazing," Belal said. "With research, you struggle a lot; you have a lot to think about, have meetings, go to them and then when you get the results it's like, ‘Wow! Oh my gosh, we're getting somewhere.'"

Belal has been surrounded by people her entire life who have impacted her decision to pursue a career in biomedical sciences. Her father is a neurosurgeon, her mother is a doctor and when she was a child her aunt was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

"I was young and didn't understand what she had," Belal said. "You're just sitting there, and then she starts shaking with tremors and moving weird. So then once I asked what was wrong with Auntie, I found out it was Parkinson's."

Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease,  and strokes result from calcium overload and brain cell death.

 "Once we find out the mechanisms by which excess toxicity is triggered, we can apply this same drug to those diseases," Chan said.

Senior biology major Terri Furbish said she also witnessed firsthand the damage neurodegenerative diseases can do to someone when a close friend's grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

"She went from owning a little shop in New Smyrna one year, to being in nursing home care where she couldn't take care of herself and didn't know who she was or my friend was," Furbish said. "It's a sad series of diseases because people forget who they are and they have loss of control and all that stuff," she said. "I can't imagine losing that kind of control."

The project was started by LSU professor Youming Lu, a former associate professor at the UCF Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences in the College of Medicine. It was funded by The National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.