Preclinical evaluation of EPHX2 inhibition as a novel treatment for inflammatory bowel disease

Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) are signaling lipids produced by cytochrome P450 epoxygenation of arachidonic acid, which are metabolized by EPHX2 (epoxide hydrolase 2, alias soluble epoxide hydrolase or sEH). EETs have pleiotropic effects, including anti-inflammatory activity. Using a Connectivity Map (CMAP) approach, we identified an inverse-correlation between an exemplar EPHX2 inhibitor (EPHX2i) compound response and an inflammatory bowel disease patient-derived signature. To validate the gene-disease link, we tested a pre-clinical tool EPHX2i (GSK1910364) in a mouse disease model, where it showed improved outcomes comparable to or better than the positive control Cyclosporin A. Up-regulation of cytoprotective genes and down-regulation of proinflammatory cytokine production were observed in colon samples obtained from EPHX2i-treated mice. Follow-up immunohistochemistry analysis verified the presence of EPHX2 protein in infiltrated immune cells from Crohn's patient tissue biopsies. We further demonstrated that GSK2256294, a clinical EPHX2i, reduced the production of IL2, IL12p70, IL10 and TNFα in both ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease patient-derived explant cultures. Interestingly, GSK2256294 reduced IL4 and IFNγ in ulcerative colitis, and IL1β in Crohn's disease specifically, suggesting potential differential effects of GSK2256294 in these two diseases. Taken together, these findings suggest a novel therapeutic use of EPHX2 inhibition for IBD.

Pathway and Ontology Analysis: Emerging Approaches Connecting Transcriptome Data and Clinical Endpoints

The increasing use of gene expression profiling offers great promise in clinical research into disease biology and its treatment. Along with the ability to measure changing expression levels in thousands of genes at once, comes the challenge of analyzing and interpreting the vast sets of data generated. Analysis tools are evolving rapidly to meet such challenges. The next step is to interpret observed changes in terms of the biological properties or relationships underlying them. One powerful approach is to make associations between the genes that are under investigation and well-known biochemical or signaling pathways, and further to assess the significance of such associations. Similarly, genes can be mapped to standardized biological categories via an ontology resource. We discuss these approaches and several web-based resources and tools designed to facilitate such analyses. This information can be used to facilitate understanding and to help design more focused experiments for validating the relevance and importance of these biological pathways and processes in human disease and therapeutics.

Infrared amide I' band of the coiled coil

The Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectra of several coiled-coil proteins have been shown to possess unusual features in the amide I' region. Band maxima occur in the vicinity of 1630 cm-1, with component bands at higher frequency. This is well below the observed band at 1650 cm-1 found in standard alpha-helical polypeptides such as poly-L-alanine. Normal mode calculations on models of the coiled-coil structure have been performed to investigate this issue. We find that the observed band profile can be reproduced with very small random variation on the phi, psi of tropomyosin. We believe that the shift to lower frequency is due to additional hydrogen bonding of the solvent accessible backbone CO groups to water.

Understanding normal modes of proteins

In order to obtain accurate normal modes of proteins, which is a prerequisite for detailed analyses in a variety of vibrational spectroscopic techniques, reliable conformation-dependent force fields are required. We discuss the use of empirical polypeptide force fields for this purpose, since they have generally been quite successful in reproducing spectra of synthetic polypeptides. Although their limitations are motivating our development of a spectroscopically determined force field (SDFF), empirical force fields can still provide important insights into the normal modes of proteins. We illustrate this by calculations on deoxymyoglobin. Together with ab initio dipole derivatives, amide I and amide II IR band profiles have been computed. These, together with the eigenvectors, show how helix irregularity and force constant variation can influence the delocalization of displacements in the mode, and the shape and breadth of observed bands. The influence of rigid peptide group geometry on the low-frequency density-of-states is also examined.