Orthosteric and Allosteric Ligands of Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors for Smoking Cessation
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Frontiers - Publisher Connector MINI REVIEW published: 25 November 2015 doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2015.00071 Orthosteric and Allosteric Ligands of Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors for Smoking Cessation Tasnim S. Mohamed 1, Selwyn S. Jayakar 2 and Ayman K. Hamouda 1,3* 1 Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, Kingsville, TX, USA, 2 Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 3 Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics, College of Medicine, Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, Bryan, TX, USA Nicotine addiction, the result of tobacco use, leads to over six million premature deaths world-wide per year, a number that is expected to increase by a third within the next two decades. While more than half of smokers want and attempt to quit, only a small percentage of smokers are able to quit without pharmacological interventions. Therefore, over the past decades, researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry have focused their attention on the development of more effective smoking cessation therapies, which is now a growing 1.9 billion dollar market. Because the role of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR) in nicotine addiction is well established, nAChR based therapeutics remain the leading strategy for smoking cessation. However, the development of neuronal nAChR drugs that are selective for a nAChR subpopulation is challenging, and only few neuronal nAChR drugs are clinically available. Among the many neuronal nAChR subtypes that have been identified in the brain, the a4b2 subtype is the most abundant and plays a critical role in nicotine addiction.
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