Patent yields hope for those with traumatic brain injuries
Professor Sanjay Kumar, Ph. D., displays a model of the amino acid D-serine in his laboratory at the College of Medicine’ s Department of Biomedical Sciences.
By Audrey Post FSU College of Medicine
Sanjay Kumar, Ph. D., whose decades of research into Temporal Lobe Epilepsy( TLE) have helped scientists better understand many aspects of neuroinflammation and how it leads to neuronal death, has been awarded a patent for using D-serine to prevent neuroinflammation caused by traumatic brain injury( TBI).
The introduction of D-serine reduces the onset and severity of seizures. Additionally, it may have application in non- TBI neurodegenerative disorders.
“ The brain is a sacrosanct organ and, as such, it does not tolerate well the introduction of foreign substances that might be used as therapeutic intervention,” said Kumar, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Florida State University College of Medicine.“ But D-serine is an amino acid produced in the brain, and thus not a foreign substance at all, so it works very well.”
Several years ago, Kumar and his associates discovered a special class of glutamate receptors, lovingly dubbed“ FSU receptors,” in the entorhinal cortex of the brain that allow about five times more calcium to enter neurons than conventional receptors do. The overstimulated neurons were triggering seizures in animal models with TLE. The overstimulation, known as hyperexcitability, causes neurons to die in a process called excitotoxicity. D-serine blocks the receptors to keep excess levels of calcium from entering the neurons, preventing seizures and neuronal death.
Glutamate is the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter released by nerve cells in the brain and central nervous
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