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Mental Health News
Posted online: Saturday, August 25, 2007

Removing Harmful Iron from Brain Prevents Neurological Diseases

A team of chemists are developing ways to bind iron in the brain to
fight the neurological damage of diseases.

The Duke University chemists say that the key is to remove potentially
harsh forms of iron that produce harmful free radicals while leaving
benign forms of iron alone to perform crucial functions in the body.

"Using existing chelating (metal-binding) molecules to target iron in
the brain can be tricky because iron is essential to the body. We want
to go after only the iron that is causing the damage. We don't want to
pull the iron out of healthy sites," said Katherine Franz, an
assistant chemistry professor at Duke.

Franz said that her team is developing ways to formulate sensitive
chemical sentinels they call "pro-chelators." Those are metal-binding
agents wrapped in chemical "cages" so they can enter the brain and
wait in reserve until they encounter a site of potential damage.

Such a site contains both iron and the molecule hydrogen peroxide. The
reaction between these two players -- known as a "Fenton reaction" --
can lead to the production of a highly reactive oxygen-containing
chemical group called a hydroxyl radical, Franz said.

These toxic chemical radicals can cause oxidative stress in brain
cells that has been linked to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's as well as
other age-related maladies such as macular degeneration in the eyes,
she said.

The pro-chelators that Franz contain phenols that carry chemical
"masks" around themselves to keep them from binding with benign forms
of iron or other metals, such as those found in some essential
enzymes. But the presence of excessive amounts of hydrogen peroxide
will activate an unmasking, allowing the phenols to sop up and
inactivate the bad iron, she said.

Franz and graduate student Louise Charkoudian have described their
first formula for a pro-chelator in a report published in the Journal
of the American Chemical Society.

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