Epoxyazadiradione ameliorates Parkinson's disease by upregulating heat shock factor 1 and protein degradation pathways in mice.

Parkinsons disease (PD) is a major debilitating health concern for millions of the elderly population all over the world. This progressive neurodegenerative disorder also poses a severe mental and financial burden to caregivers and society. Despite a major thrust on research for therapy development, no significant progress has been made; only temporary management options are currently available. To this end, we have reported azadiradione (AZD), a triterpenoid that we isolated from neem seed extract using a cell-based assay. AZD showed high efficacy in ameliorating protein aggregation-induced pathology and symptoms in fruit flies and mice. Current evidence suggests that AZD functions through activating the transcriptional function of heat shock factor 1 (HSF1), a master regulator of protein quality control pathways, without modulating the cellular redox balance. To better understand the pharmacophore of AZD, a triterpenoid in its observed function, we have analysed various structural derivatives, focusing on their HSF1-activating function in vitro and their efficacies in ameliorating protein aggregation-induced toxicities in cell and mouse models. Our analyses, based on real-time PCR, immunoblots, fluorescent anisotropy, and a mouse model of MPTP-induced PD, highlighted Epoxy-azadiradione (Epoxy) as being as efficient as AZD in in vivo functional tests, albeit activating the promoter binding activity of HSF1 with at least two-fold higher efficacy in vitro. Notably, similar to AZD, Epoxy did not induce cellular redox imbalance. We also incorporated molecular docking analyses involving the published crystal structure of the DNA-binding domain of HSF1 bound to its DNA recognition element to study molecular dynamics-based energy estimation. The analysis revealed a higher energy stability of the epoxy-bound complexes, as indicated by a significant decrease in binding free energy ({Delta}G) estimated from an ensemble of intermediate docked complex structures.