I think what jolted me out of my multi-month posting torpor is next week’s annual meeting of the Movement Disorders Society. I’ve been preparing a lecture on the treatment of PSP, CBD and MSA, and that got my juices flowing.

Speaking of treatment, an interesting paper that appeared in Plos One during my writer’s block came out of Günter Höglinger’s lab in Munich. Julius Bruch was first author. It builds on the observation that people with Guadeloupean tauopathy are far more likely than local controls to have consumed the fruits sweetsop and soursop, which contain annonacin, a mitochondrial Complex I inhibitor. Subsequent work with annonacin has suggested that it can cause a tauopathy in rats.
The new paper found that annonacin upregulates the production of 4R tau, the predominant form in PSP and some other tauopathies, by favoring the inclusion of the exon 10 peptide product into the finished tau molecule. Further experiments described in the same paper showed that annonacin upregulates the splicing factor SRSF2, which is one of a handful of factors known to regulate splicing of exon 10. So they used silencing RNA to knock down SRSF2. The result was a dramatic reduction in 4R tau.

They then took the next step and analyzed human PSP brain tissue for SRSF2, finding it markedly elevated compared to controls with no neurological disease.

To examine the possibility that the elevation of 4R tau and SRSF2 by annonacin was the result of mitochondrial Complex I inhibition rather than of nonspecific cellular stress or nutrient deprivation, they treated neuronal cultures with MPP+, a well-studied Complex I inhibitor, but not with 6-hydroxydopamine, a toxin that works independent of Complex I, or with nonspecific nutritional deprivation.

So it looks like a drug that inhibits SRSF2 could correct the abnormal 4R/3R ratio in PSP and potentially prevent cell loss. But a lot of work remains to determine how important this particular pathway is in causing the cell loss. The highly variable 4R/3R concentration across different brain areas in PSP and the existence of tauopathies with normal or low 4R/3R ratios show that the story isn’t so simple. But with the recent explosion of interest from drug companies in PSP as a route to Alzheimer’s disease, any new approach could attract interest, and this one deserves a place on the list.  I don’t know if any existing or approved drugs inhibit SRSF2, but that could be a good job for a lab that’s tooled up for high-throughput screening.