Rare Diseases Symptoms Automatic Extraction

Drug screening to identify suppressors of GFAP expression.

[alexander disease]

Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is the major intermediate filament protein of astrocytes in the vertebrate central nervous system. Increased levels of GFAP are the hallmark feature of gliosis, a non-specific response of astrocytes to a wide variety of injuries and disorders of the CNS, and also occur in Alexander disease where the initial insult is a mutation within the coding region of GFAP itself. In both settings, excess GFAP may cause or exacerbate astrocyte dysfunction. With the goal of finding drugs that reduce the expression of GFAP, we have devised screens to detect changes in GFAP promoter activity or protein levels in primary cultures of mouse astrocytes in a 96-well format. We have applied these screens to libraries enriched in compounds that are already approved for human use by the FDA. We report that several compounds are active at micromolar levels in suppressing the expression of GFAP. Treatment of mice for 3 weeks with one of these drugs, clomipramine, causes nearly 50% reduction in the levels of GFAP protein in brain.

Diseases presenting "central nervous system" symptom

  • 22q11.2 deletion syndrome
  • adrenomyeloneuropathy
  • alexander disease
  • aniridia
  • aromatase deficiency
  • canavan disease
  • child syndrome
  • classical phenylketonuria
  • congenital toxoplasmosis
  • cowden syndrome
  • cushing syndrome
  • cystinuria
  • dracunculiasis
  • erdheim-chester disease
  • fabry disease
  • gm1 gangliosidosis
  • hereditary cerebral hemorrhage with amyloidosis
  • hirschsprung disease
  • hodgkin lymphoma, classical
  • kabuki syndrome
  • kallmann syndrome
  • kindler syndrome
  • krabbe disease
  • lamellar ichthyosis
  • legionellosis
  • liposarcoma
  • malignant atrophic papulosis
  • monosomy 21
  • neonatal adrenoleukodystrophy
  • phenylketonuria
  • proteus syndrome
  • scrub typhus
  • severe combined immunodeficiency
  • sneddon syndrome
  • triple a syndrome
  • von hippel-lindau disease
  • waldenström macroglobulinemia
  • well-differentiated liposarcoma
  • wiskott-aldrich syndrome
  • wolf-hirschhorn syndrome
  • x-linked adrenoleukodystrophy
  • zellweger syndrome

You can validate or delete this automatically detected symptom