Browse Technologies

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Vascular inflammation caused by metabolic, autoimmune, and microbial insults mediates cardiovascular diseases that include hypertension and atherosclerosis (heart attacks, strokes), systemic lupus, and giant cell arteritis. An estimated 35 million Americans have hypercholesterolemia, contributing to 500,000 deaths underlying heart attacks and strokes. In these diseases, metabolic, autoimmune, and microbial insults continually challenge blood and vascular cells by triggering signaling to the nucleus mediated by BCL10. Genetic ablation of BCL10 rescues animals from atherosclerosis, aortic aneurysms, and fatty liver and insulin resistance due to overnutrition. Intracellular therapy with CP-CRADD is designed to extinguish BCL10-mediated noxious signals to avert vascular inflammation and its life-threatening complications including ruptured aneurysms in aorta and brain.

TagDock is an efficient rigid body molecular docking algorithm that generates three-dimensional models of oligomeric biomolecular complexes in instances where there is limited experimental restraint data to guide the docking calculations. Through "distance difference analysis" TagDock additionally recommends followup experiments to further discriminate divergent (score-degenerate) clusters of TagDock's initial solution models

Vanderbilt researchers have developed an injectable drug delivery vehicle using microparticles (MPs) that not only provide sustained cargo delivery over extended time but also play a therapeutic role themselves in reducing inflammation. This drug delivery platform can be used in treating ocular diseases such as glaucoma and traumatic optic neuropathy, as well as other inflammatory diseases throughout the body like peripheral arterial disease and osteoarthritis.

The G-protein activated, inward-rectifying potassium (K+) channels, "GIRKs", are a family of ion channels that has been the focus of intense research interest for nearly two decades. GIRK has been shown to play important roles in the pathophysiology of diseases such as anxiety, epilepsy, Down's syndrome, pain perception and drug addiction. Here scientists at Vanderbilt developed the first truly potent, effective, and selective GIRK activator, ML297 (VU0456810) and demonstrated that ML297 is active in animal models of epilepsy. While the group is using ML297 to continue to explore the therapeutic benefits of GIRK modulation, they are continuing to develop more selective and druggable GIRK inhibitors from different scaffolds.