DAVIS, CA — A newly published study by a team of university scientists in Japan, China and UC Davis shows that inhibiting an enzyme, the soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH), plays a key role in curbing the inflammation associated with the development and progression of Parkinson's disease, an age-related brain disorder that affects a million Americans, mostly 60 and over.

The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is primarily the work of scientists in the labs of Kenji Hashimoto, a professor with the Division of Clinical Neuroscience, Chiba University Center for Forensic Mental Health, Chiba, Japan, and Bruce Hammock, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology with a joint appointment in the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Our research suggests that the sEH inhibitor may prevent the progression of Parkinson's disease (PD) as well as treat patients with dementia of Lewy bodies (DLB) if the sEH inhibitor is used in early phases of patients with these disorders," said Hashimoto, whose career spans 30 years in the development of blood biomarkers and novel therapeutic drugs and includes more than 550 publications on the topic. "Both PD and DLB are chronic and progressive movement disorders. However, the precise causes of these diseases are largely unknown."

Statistics indicate physicians diagnose 60,000 new cases of Parkinson's disease every year in the United States. The average age of onset is 60, and is more predominant among men. Defining sEH "as a key regulatory enzyme involved in the metabolism of fatty acids," Hammock noted that in "our previous research, we have found that sEH inhibitors treat neuropathic and inflammatory pain in humans and companion animals. These inhibitors stabilize natural analgesic and anti-inflammatory mediators. Now we're finding that these inhibitors play a key role in Parkinson's disease."

Hammock said that the work by lead author Qian Ren and his colleagues in the Hashimoto lab "shows that markers and symptoms of Parkinson's disease in whole mice and in human cells with a mutation associated with Parkinson's disease can be treated with a small druglike molecule. By establishing this causal chain of events leading to Lewy body disorders we can better predict environmental chemicals that could predispose people to Parkinson's disease and possibly even treat the disease." The paper, titled "Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase Plays a Key Role in the Pathogenesis of Parkinson's Disease," is co-authored by 14 scientists, including Professor Hammock and Jun Yang and Sung Hee Hwang, all part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"Although there are many medications available to treat symptoms in PD, these do not prevent the progression of the disease, and, to date, no agent with a disease-modifying or neuroprotective indication for PD has been approved," said Hashimoto. "Therefore, the development of new drugs possessing disease-modifying and /or neuroprotective properties is critical."

In research studies involving mice, the scientists found "that sEH plays a key role in the inflammation associated with PD pathogenesis and the mechanisms that lead to the disease," Hashimoto said. "The sEH inhibitor or deletion of the sEH gene protected against MPTP-induced neurotoxicity in mouse brain." MPTP is an acronym for methyl-4-phenyl-1, 2, 3, 6 tetrahydropyridine, a relative of cyperquat and paraquat herbicides. "Our findings indicate that sEH inhibitors or epoxy fatty acids mimics may be promising prophylactic or therapeutic drugs for alpha-synuclein-related neurodegenerative disorders."

"Accumulating evidence suggests that various inflammatory processes play a central role in the pathogenesis of PD," said Ren, an assistant professor at Chiba University Center Forensic Mental Health, Chiba University. "Studies using postmortem brain samples have demonstrated the involvement of inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress and the sEH enzyme in affected regions in PD patients. All of these biochemical disorders are treated by the experimental drug used in this study. It is likely that sEH inhibitors and other anti-inflammatory drugs, as well as neuroprotective drugs, will mitigate symptoms in PD patients." Robert Higgins, emeritus professor of neuropathology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, said: "I find it exciting that Ren and colleagues illustrate a promising path to a drug to prevent the progression of Parkinson's disease. It is impressive how far this work has come since we collaborated with Shirley Gee and the Hammock laboratory on developing a sheep model of Parkinson's disease in the early 1980s."