I attended a biochemistry lecture by Professor Debra Kendall from the University of Connecticut on allosteric, biased signaling modulators of cannabinoid receptors. Her interest was to understand receptors and their ability to regulate specific activity. She looked at the GPCR superfamily, a large receptor family contributing to about 3% of the human genome. She used her knowledge on GPCR ligands and receptor activation to show how GPCR’s affect drug discovery and treatment for central nervous system disorders as well as cancer. In this talk, she also explained how GCPR’s affect a variety of human functions including but not limited to cognition, appetite, mood, movement, stress and pain. However, all of these functions are integrated preventing specific selection of dopamine or cannabinoid receptors, for example. She also talked about how mutations in GPCR’s can lead to disease but also have positive roles as drugs such as Claritin and Singular. Her research is important because allosteric ligands that bind to specific allosteric sites are potentially valuable therapeutics and can help future the treatment of many diseases. In this talk, her focus on the cannabinoid receptor is significant as more and more research is done concerning cannabis and its effect on the body. Microbiological research such as that done by Dr. Kendall is a snapshot of the future of medicine and science.
So in a way, will this research project bring forth a way to individualize a persons treatment plans, as well as figure out how a drug may affect a person based solely off of the information presented by their genome? And it's interesting to know that these receptors are interconnected, such as attributes such as appetite, mood, movement, etc to things that affect your perception to drugs. I would like to do further research to understand what the future of medicine might look like.
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