Project Leader:   
Terrance Snutch

Involved Institution:   
University of British Columbia  

Research Funding Program:   
SOF 2

This project is focused on generating new cost-effective and specific drug screening tools for treatment of migraine, epilepsy, chronic pain, heart disease and blindness.

Calcium channels play essential roles in the nervous, hormone and muscular systems of all animals. They are an important target for the therapeutic treatment of human disorders including migraine, epilepsy, chronic pain, mood disorders, heart disease and certain types of cancer. In order to both better understand how calcium channels contribute to these diseases and to develop new drugs targeting specific disorders, it is essential that the same proteins functioning in cells be reproduced for study in the laboratory and for drug screening.

Research has shown that during growth and development many more versions, or variants, of the calcium channels exist than previously thought. Further research has shown that naturally occurring genetic mutations affect certain channel variants significantly more than others, thus it is important to identify and replicate the complexity of naturally occurring variants associated with specific diseases.

Researchers will combine existing expertise in calcium channel physiology with the latest high-throughput gene sequencing techniques to identify the exact nature of calcium channel variants relevant to certain disease models. The project will also utilize newly developed software designed to specifically identify single variants amongst a complex population of gene sequences.

Together, this highly focused approach will result in significant time and cost savings compared to existing strategies and facilitate the generation of new and more specific drug screening targets. This unique combination of resources will also advance our under-standing of the functional complexity of calcium channels and provide new information concerning their physiological contributions.