Some early details on AP-001 (also known as neuroprotectin D1 or NPD1), a novel therapeutic currently being studied by Anida Pharma to treat noise-related and age-related hearing loss.
Background:
Anida Pharma is a private biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, focused on developing new drugs “to prevent and restore sensory organ dysfunction.”
The company’s lead drug candidate is a compound called “AP-001” and… what makes AP-001 special is that it works on multiple pathways all at once: e.g., “inflammation, cell death and tissue repair, both epithelial and nerve regrowth” — all of which are known to be associated with hearing impairment, to different degrees, in varying contexts.
AP-001 (also known as neuroprotectin D1 or NPD1), it seems, has the potential to treat hearing loss — including noise-related, drug-related, and/or age-related causes.
Rough draft copy of explanation [work-in-progress]:
Worth mentioning: AP-001 is endogenous. In other words, the body makes it naturally. And, even more interesting, is the role it plays…
Basically, AP-001’s normal job is to clean up any messes caused by the body’s immune system. So the body’s immune system recognizes a threat. Attacks said threat. And sometimes there is a mess. Collateral damage. Well, when that happens, the body releases AP-001… which is deployed to fix, repair, restore any destruction caused during the immune response and battle.
You can think of AP-001 as the body’s own cleanup crew… and a function within the body that has evolved as a tool to repair the chaos and damage following a immune attack damage. It is referred to as a “counter-mechanism” in the science section of the Anida Pharma website. I like that.
Anyway, the main reason this counter-mechanism exists is… because the body wants to make sure important functions (such as sight or hearing) are not permanently lost after getting caught up in the crossfire of an immune system battle.
And so, a special mechanism evolved to handle that “messy” repair and cleanup job. Before the damaged system collapsed to a point of no return.
Now, here is how this relates to hearing restoration…
Scientists believe they have discovered a way to harness that “counter-mechanism” and its special “rebuilding” toolset… and extend its purpose beyond that of “clean up crew” in wake of a big immune system battle… and instead deploy it in response to any sort of damage, for various purposes.
So, with respect to hearing loss… the “repair job” could be using AP-001 to fix any sort of trauma or loss… not just an immune warzone… e.g. it could be noise trauma, ototoxicity/drug-induced, or even be used to reverse age-related damage and progression.
The idea here is, this natural “counter-mechanism” (a.k.a. AP-001) might still be effective beyond its original duty (which was limited to immune attack rebuilding)… and applicable to situations where it might not have been released naturally, in great enough volume.
[DRAFT]
Some hearing loss-related tidbits from the official Anida Pharma company website:
“Anida is also working at identifying treatments to restore the hearing in individuals suffering age- and noise-related hearing loss.”
“Anida is a preclinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging the knowledge around the body’s own homeostatic and protective mechanisms to develop targeted therapeutics in the fields of vision and hearing.”
“AP-001, is an endogenous lipid-derived agonistic small molecule from the DHA metabolome.”
Le “annotated Anida Pharma pipeline” snapshot:
(Image credit and source of original image: https://www.anidapharma.com/)
This article is a work in progress. [Last updated on 7/25/2021 at 5:09pm EST.] For now, I just wanted to share news of “AP-001” ASAP and add it to the hearing loss treatment radar. (So more people know that it exists.) Also…
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References
- https://www.anidapharma.com/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5500902/
- More research to follow, with research related to the drug’s mechanism and scientific papers…