Specialty Grand Challenge for Brain Disease Mechanisms

[...]there is a major unmet need to identify treatment options, which are disease modifying and thereby affect fundamental mechanisms implicated in pathogenic processes leading to disease and its progression. Specifically, core metabolites, such as adenosine are uniquely linked to energy homeostasis (ATP), used as building blocks of biomolecules (RNA, including poly-A tails of mRNAs), coupled to transmethylation reactions (DNA and histone methylation), and act as receptor ligands (adenosine receptors) (Boison, 2013;Boison and Yegutkin, 2019). [...]adenosine is a unique network regulator linking metabolism and gene expression with neuromodulation. [...]adenosine augmentation therapies, e.g., through engineered stem cells (Fedele et al., 2004;Li et al., 2009), are uniquely suited to restore network homeostasis, and to not only suppress comorbid symptoms but also to exert lasting disease modifying therapeutic effects (Li et al., 2008;Boison, 2012;Shen et al., 2012;Williams-Karnesky et al., 2013). Because epigenetic mechanisms regulate gene expression, there is an urgent need to invest in the field of epigenomics which is one of the remaining frontiers in neuroscience.