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A study from the UAB Neurosciences Institute (INc UAB) demonstrates in animal models the benefits of vorinostat after a cerebral stroke. The drug, which is approved for use in humans in a type of cutaneous lymphoma, would attenuate brain lesions and promote tissue recovery.
Ischemic stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide and occurs when blood flow cannot reach the brain due to an obstruction. For a more or less long time, the brain does not receive oxygen and this causes damage and functional deterioration. Hypertension is a more common modifiable risk factor for stroke and is associated with worse recoveries.
Currently, there is only one pharmacological treatment to mitigate the effects of stroke, but not all patients can benefit and, in addition, it is associated with some important adverse effects. Now, researchers from the INc UAB have shown that vorinosat (suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid) has great potential when treating the resulting brain lesions.
This drug, which is used in the treatment of a type of cutaneous lymphoma, inhibits histone deacetylases, enzymes that regulate gene expression by modifying the acetylation levels of a group of proteins called histones.
In an article published in the journal Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, the research group demonstrates that a stroke model in hypertensive rats is very close to the clinical situation, and how the use of this drug causes the animals to improve neurological deficits, reducing their brain damage and the inflammatory response is attenuated, among other effects.
“We saw that with just a single dose of drug, applied during the reperfusion period, multiple factors associated with stroke pathology can be prevented. This opens the way to research with this type of treatment beyond the preclinical phase,” explains the first author of the article Andrea Díaz, researcher at the UAN and the Networked Biomedical Research Center on Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED).
Furthermore, researchers show that the treatment protects not only the brain, but also the vessels that surround it, and does so until a few hours after the stroke.
“Given the urgent clinical need for drugs to treat acute ischemic stroke, and that vorinostat is approved for human use, these findings should encourage the approach of more preclinical research that evaluates, for example, the effect of females and old animals, in animal models with other common stroke comorbidities such as diabetes, long-term effects, etc. This would open the way to the correct design of future clinical trials that do not test the efficacy and safety in patients who have suffered stroke," concludes the study coordinator Francesc Jiménez-Altayí, researcher at the Department of Pharmacology, Therapeutics and Toxicology of the UAB and the Cardiovascular diseases area of the Network Biometric Research Center (CIBERCV).
