Serbia will make a drug for SMA: It will be cheaper and more effective than Zolgensma

The development of a significantly cheaper and more effective drug to alleviate the symptoms of spinal muscular atrophy in infants is the goal of the SMAIPROTACs project, which is financed by the Science Fund of Serbia within the Prizma program.
For these purposes, the Fund allocated 284,781 euros. New medicines will be developed using artificial intelligence. A team of scientists from the University of Kragujevac and Belgrade will, during the next three years, come up with an innovative drug that will cause the degradation of HDAC4 in proteosomes and thus slow down or completely stop muscle degradation in SMA.
In an interview with "Novosti", team leader Dr. Milan Mladenovi, associate professor of the Faculty of Science and Mathematics in Kragujevac, states that, feeling empathy for families struggling with SMA, as university professors and scientists, they considered it an obligation to contribute to the fight with their research pertaining to this disease, hoping that their efforts in a few years will result in drugs to ease the symptoms of this serious disease. This is how the team was assembled, made up of biochemists, geneticists and organic chemists, experts in their fields.
"Our research concept is designed not to perform chemical modifications of human DNA and thereby stimulate the creation of SMN proteins (an approach that proved to be ineffective), but to try to inactivate proteins that surround DNA, so-called epigenetic proteins, and thereby indirectly influence the further development of the disease", Professor Mladenovi states.
"Epigenetics is a scientific discipline with an extraordinary expansion and a potentially great impact on medicine. Our contribution to epigenetics will also be through the application of artificial...