Currently,
no therapeutics exist to prevent this disease, but recent collaborative
research at Cornell reveals that the application of a proprietary
peptide known as SS-31 may protect cartilage from the injury that leads
to arthritis.
Delco is a board-certified large-animal surgeon and assistant research professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences, in the College of Veterinary Medicine.
Her time spent in clinical practice treating equine athletes for sports
injuries motivated her to search for ways to treat and prevent
osteoarthritis.
“Just
like human athletes,” Delco said, “horses are particularly prone to
injury-related arthritis. In human athletes, the disease is often
career-ending. In our patients, it can be life-threatening.”
While
the prevalence of osteoarthritis continues to rise, current drugs
target only the symptoms, not the underlying disease itself. “Forget
preventing osteoarthritis,” she said, “right now we don’t have a single
drug that even slows down progression of the disease.”
In
younger individuals and athletes, arthritis typically develops
following joint trauma. But how injury to the cartilage surface is
translated into an ongoing degenerative process has been unclear. Delco
believes mitochondria, the “battery pack” of the cell, are key mediators
of this injury-to-disease cascade, but there was no direct evidence for
that role.
Now,
Delco and colleagues in biomedical engineering and physics have found
that mitochondria are a linchpin in the body’s response to injury.
They’ve also found a drug that can interrupt the injury response.
That
drug, SS-31, was developed by Dr. Hazel Szeto, Ph.D. ’77, former
professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a co-author of
the paper. SS-31 is known to protect and heal mitochondria in other
parts of the body.
Delco and her CVM colleagues were the first to explore its effects in cartilage, and revealed in an earlier study that
SS-31 helped protect injured chondrocytes days after an injury. Delco
wanted to further understand how mitochondria respond to injury, and how
SS-31 might protect cells.
“Since
osteoarthritis is caused by both biological and mechanical factors,”
she said, “we need to evaluate them simultaneously to understand what is
happening during injury.”
While
SS-31’s mechanism of action is not completely known, scientists do know
that the peptide enables mitochondria to maintain membrane structure
and function during various types of cellular injury – referred to as
“mitoprotection.”
“Our
finding that SS-31 has this protective effect after mechanical injury
is exciting,” says Delco. “It suggests mitoprotection may be a new
strategy for preventing arthritis after joint trauma.”
-By Lauren Cahoon Roberts
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