THERPA: A small molecule database related to prion protein regulation and prion diseases progression

Abstract

Prion diseases are fatal neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Although various small molecules have been evaluated for application in the treatment of prion diseases, none have been shown to be efficacious. Expanding our knowledge of these molecules is important for understanding of the complex mechanisms of prion diseases. To improve access to the scattered information on small molecules related to prion diseases, we built a database of therapeutic molecules associated with prion diseases (THERPA, therpa.pythonanywhere.com). THERPA includes 119 small molecules and their 283 relationships with prion diseases. THERPA is an interactive visual database and useful for improving search efficiency which can help researchers identify intrinsic small molecules that can be used for developing therapeutics for prion diseases.

Keywords: Database; Prion; Prion diseases; THERPA; small molecules.

Figure 1.

Example pie chart of materials used in experiments described in the curated public articles. (A) All materials organized in this study were visualized. (B) Sub-pie chart of materials originated from mice. Click “Back to Materials” on the upper right panel of image to return to the original pie chart.

Figure 2.

A tree map. Each branch of the tree is given as a rectangle, tiled with smaller rectangles representing sub-branches. Each branch indicates a relationship of small molecules to PrP and/or prion diseases progression. The first sub-branch provides small molecules included in each branch. The second sub-branch provides the PMID describing the role of each small molecule. (A) Two hundred eighty-three relationships between small molecules and PrP and/or prion diseases are shown. (B) Sub-tree map structure of PrP^Sc downregulation is shown.

Figure 3.

Process of searching small molecules related to PrP and/or prion diseases progression.