How One Drug Could Affect Pain, Memory and Nicotine Addiction
All of these functions -- and many more, from muscle contraction to modulation of sleep, attention, learning and memory -- involve nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which come in different varieties that determine their role. "Based on their location and subunit composition, nicotinic acetylcholine receptors have different functions, biophysical properties and pharmacological characteristics," said Ayman K. Hamouda, BPharm, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Texas A&M College of Pharmacy and the Department of Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics at the Texas A&M College of Medicine. "We're trying to develop drugs to modulate those functions, but in a far more selective way than anything currently on the market." It became relatively easy to develop what is called a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist, which is a compound that binds to and activates a receptor. Years of research have yielded a pretty go...