Rhubarb acid may be used to treat progressive frostbite

A research team from Kyoto University reported in the US journal of Science Translational Medicine on the 1st that when they used iPS cells from patients with frostbite to carry out experiments, they found that rhubarb had the effect of improving neural abnormalities, or it was allowed to develop new therapeutic drugs The medical name of progressive frostbite is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is a kind of disease that results in muscle weakness gradually due to the abnormality of motor nerve cells Hawking, a famous physicist, is suffering from this disease The medical community has not found a way to cure it, so it is listed as one of the world-class persistent diseases The research team differentiated iPS cells from patients with progressive frostbite into motor neurons and studied their properties The results showed that the length of the synapse transmitting signal was only about half of that in normal condition, and a special protein named "tdp43" agglutinated on the cytoplasm, which was consistent with the actual pathological characteristics The accumulation of this protein will lead to the abnormal function of genes related to the formation of nerve cells The team added a variety of substances to the culture medium of motor nerve cells for many times The results showed that rhubarb can inhibit the synthesis of "tdp43" protein, and the length of synapse can also develop to a normal level Rhubarb acid is a natural component in the sap of rhubarb, which has certain toxicity and can also be used as a cardiotonic for medical treatment The team believes that this achievement is not an animal experiment, but uses the neural cells differentiated from iPS cells of patients to confirm the drug effect, so it is of great significance We hope to develop new drugs after confirming the safety.