Re: Apabetalone downregulates factors and pathways associated with vascular calcification
posted on
Nov 21, 2018 10:05AM
Tada,
I don't claim to fully understand the paper either. I can follow ChIP-Seq genome wide analyses, but I often need to defer to my colleagues who actually do this technique to fully understand. Fortunately, my good friend is one of the world's experts in this technique so I will pick his brain on this sometime.
I think what it does exemplify is that BRD4 and other BET proteins affected by BET inhibition are involved in the regulation of a lot of genes in various pathways. So there is still a lot of unchartered waters in terms of biological effects of BET inhibition.
"Could this open Apabetalone up to be tested on patients with osteoporosis?"
From the paper...."Processes involved in VC are similar to the mineralization of bone, and therefore strategies to alleviate VC could have effects on bone metabolism. However, preclinical models have demonstrated that BETi do not diminish bone structure or mechanical properties, and may increase bone volume and restore mechanical strength [16, 17, 18]." Other than that, I don't think there is any publicly available info on this topic.
"If this works on VSMCs for sick people would Apabetalone work on healthy individuals (like athletes) on their large muscles cleaning anything out of them and allow for some type of blood doping."
I'm not sure where you're going here Tada. How does vascular smooth muscle cell transdifferentiation into osteoclast-like cells with increased calcification potential relate to skeletal muscle biology?
BearDownAZ