Together with our colleagues in Canada, the US and Germany, we have published our latest work in Nature Communications. The work directly shows how a recently marketed anti-epileptic drug elicits its action on a neuronal ion channel. Using synthetic amino acids, we were able to show that the drug, retigabine, binds to the channel primarily via a single hydrogen bond. Curiosly, the H-bond donor within the channel turned out to be the indole nitrogen of a tryptophan side chain, constituting a previously undescribed mechanism of a drug-receptor interaction. Ongoing research in our group, in collaboration with partners from both industry and academia (in Denmark, Canada and Germany), now focuses on complementing this work with detailed SAR studies of retigabine – see also current MSc projects.
