Hi everybody today i’m going to present my interactive case study on the drug carbidopa carbidopa or lotusin is also its other name is a dopamine promoter drug this means that it actually is going to help the brain by promoting conditions of higher dopamine levels dopamine is like an essential neurotransmitter and hormone that causes actually neurological issues when
It’s not working properly uh carbidopa works to treat parkinson’s disease and symptoms that closely resemble parkinson’s disease like uncontrollable shaking stiffness and like other mobility or movement issues it is thought that a major cause of parkinson’s um is is the brain not producing enough of dopamine carbidopa must be used with a drug containing a levodopa
And levodopa actually changes dopamine or changes like into dopamine in the brain and carbidopal works on preventing the breakdown of levodopa so that it can enter the brain and produce more dopamine there are hardly like any side effects due to carbodopa if a person is like experiencing any side effects or like nausea vomiting dizziness headache it’s more than
Likely due to that levodopa containing drug not the carbidopa and so here i use utilized the tool chimera where i was able to produce a bound structure of carbidopa the structure allows for it’s like main function of being able uh being a decarbolox oxalase inhibitor the structure also does not enable it to like enter the blood-brain barrier as well parkinson’s
Disease is actually a neurological disorder of the brain where the common symptoms are uncontrollable movements um like shaking some stiffness issues with like balance uh and muscle coordination parkinson’s disease appears to be linked um to the breakdown of nerve cells in the basal ganglia the basal ganglia nerve cells um actually end up do producing dopamine
And that’s part of the cause on why like the patients have issues with movement basal ganglia nerve cells um is also like kind of an area of the brain that does control movement it is unknown on what causes these neurons to die it also appears that the neurons or that the there is a mutation that causes parkinson’s and it can be like hereditable um heritable but
Environmental factors do appear like appear to play a huge role on whether the person will develop the disease so just because it you had a family member that has it doesn’t necessarily mean you will get it as well the diagnosis does happen about 60 years old for most people and the symptoms do appear um gradually and subtly and life expectancy is actually about
10 to 20 years after symptoms do appear parkinson’s may also cause dementia um this is called lewy body dementia and this is a serious consequence of developing this disease and so we’re going to get kind of like into how carbidopa helps parkinson’s and so levodopa is actually going to be converted into dopamine via enzymes called dopamine decarboxylases but
Carbadopa is an enzyme as well that’s classified as a dopamine decarboxylase inhibitor um this is going to prevent the levodopa from being turned into dopamine until the levodopa crosses the blood-brain barrier this function is going to be prohibited since carbidopa can’t um cross that blood-brain barrier the function of turning levadopa into dopamine is going
To continue when um the levodopa enters there are important reasons to use both carbidopa and levodopa in correcting dopamine levels um the dopamine cannot cross the blood-brain barrier meaning levodopa can only be beneficial if the dopamine decarboxylase works on it when it has passed the blood-brain barrier since dopamine can’t come in you’re going to want
Only dopamine obviously being in the central um central nervous system not the peripheral um levitopa um and there’s also like an issue with the gut um so if levodopa is like present in the gut uh it causes a lot of severe like nausea vomiting and other issues so we kind of want to prevent that from happening as well so here’s like kind of like a nice picture
I found of how levodopa and carbodopa work together you can see that levodopa is prevented from turning into dopamine in the peripheral nervous system due to that presence of carbidopa carbidopa will bind to that um decarboxylase or the ddc preventing it from changing the levodopa in the peripheral nervous system this means that levodopa is actually um going to
Be left to enter the central nervous system where then it can be turned into dopamine via the dopamine decarboxylase or the thing that was prohibited earlier um the carbidopa cannot follow it into the brain so it’s not going to impact anything over there um and yeah so it’s not going to impact anything in the central nervous system just because it can’t get over
There but it’s going to prevent all of that dopamine being created in the peripheral nervous system where it’s not going to do any good and so extra crystallography actually is going to determine the molecular and atomic structure of a crystal via the deflection of x-ray beams on like the crystal uh the nice part about this technique is that many different types
Of structures can form crystals including like salts minerals metals and even biological molecules like proteins it is very like applicable technique across a wide variety of compounds which is why it’s so nice and how does this relate back to carbidopa it’s that in 2001 the carbodopa complex was actually discovered um in that active and or in that active site
Of that decarboxylase enzyme that we were talking about on how it binds it doesn’t make and doesn’t allow it to work um and it was discovered this through via crystallography x-ray crystallography extra crystallography does occur um through steps through four steps i have a really nice picture here outlining these steps the first step is crystallizing that
Protein or making it into a crystal that the x-ray beams can like deflect um across and the second step is producing a diffraction pattern which shows parts of the crystal that absorbed the x-ray diffraction so it’s going to show like where it was absorbed and that third step is going to be analyzing that and creating an electron density map so you can see what
The electrons are most dense and then that last step is going to be determine the protein structure um that’s going to die of a lot of complex math and this is usually done through computer programs and so where are we on like parkinson’s treatment well today levodopa and carbidopa are still the main treatment option of parkinson’s uh it’s important to note
That someone must tell their doctor when they wish to stop um like using levitopa because it can have severe and fatal side effects when they’re stopped abruptly um these can be coupled to uh other like enzyme inhibitors that work to slow the degradation of dopamine in the brain so increasing the dopamine in the brain eventually um and these are like the mao b
Inhibitors and comt inhibitors um there are several other like non-medicated treatments that are used for people who don’t like medicine or refuse to take it and that could be like deep brain stimulation that can surgically place electrodes into the brain connecting to like electrical devices in the chest so this will control movement um often getting rid of like
The parkinson-like symptoms but they’re even like calmer and less intrusive um options like physical therapy speech therapy uh even massage therapy has shown to work and here are my references thank you
Transcribed from video
Interactive Case Study 3 – Carbidopa By Emma Collins