Researchers explain about the Hi1a molecule found in K'gari funnel -web spider venom and how it could potentially be used as a treatment for heart attack and stroke.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 H.I.1.A is a molecule that was discovered from the venom of the funnel web spider on
00:10 Kigari Island and we have identified it as a potent protector of the heart in the context
00:16 of injuries like heart attacks.
00:21 We've identified that this drug is effective at treating heart attacks at all time points
00:26 in the course of an injury and we've also found that the molecule is exceedingly safe
00:31 in the fact that it doesn't actually interact or affect regions of the heart that are not
00:36 injured.
00:40 When someone has a heart attack, they're taken in an ambulance to the hospital to try to
00:45 correct the injury as quickly as possible.
00:47 And so in these preclinical studies, we evaluated when this drug is effective in preventing
00:53 that injury from occurring and show that in all contexts and time points, this drug seems
00:58 to block the injuries associated with a heart attack all the way from the ambulance time
01:02 points through to the hospital.
01:08 We were very excited when we found that this molecule only binds to the injured regions
01:13 of the heart and the ability to actually visualize that molecule on the surface of the injury
01:20 is one of the most surprising findings that we had from these studies.
01:29 Super exciting.
01:30 The heart attack is one of the biggest killers in the world and yet we have absolutely no
01:35 drugs that will protect the heart during a heart attack.
01:38 So there's an incredible patient need, not just here in Australia, but worldwide and
01:42 this could be the very first drug to protect the heart during a heart attack and that will
01:47 have massive clinical implications.
01:53 This was an important preclinical study that really enabled us to understand how effective
01:57 the molecule is, how we would dose it and it positions us to, in the future, go into
02:03 human clinical trials to first of all test its safety and then look at its efficacy for
02:09 patients that are suffering from a heart attack.
02:15 So we had a particular therapeutic target we were interested in called an iron channel
02:20 and the very best source of molecules that modulate the activity of iron channels are
02:26 venoms, venomous animals.
02:27 And so we searched our collection of 500 different venoms and the winning molecule, amazingly,
02:33 was found in the venom of an Australian funnel-web spider.
02:40 So the molecule we found is found in the venom in very minute quantities so there was no
02:45 way we could possibly get enough material for what we wanted to do by milking spiders
02:50 so we had to make this not synthetically but by engineering bacteria to express the peptide.
02:59 So what happens during a heart attack is the heart doesn't get enough oxygen, that means
03:03 it needs to change the way that it burns fuel and it reverts to this ancient metabolic pathway,
03:09 the end result of which is a lot of lactate and that causes the pH to go down and it activates
03:14 this iron channel that we're interested in called ASIC1A and what that does when it's
03:20 activated is lead to death of the heart muscle cells.
03:24 And so what this molecule does is simply stop that channel responding to the acidosis that
03:31 you see during a heart attack and that in turn prevents all that downstream cell death
03:35 that you would otherwise get in the heart.