Protecting the brain

Donald Weaver. (Nick Pearce Photo)

Donald Weaver tells his research team its job is to design new drugs that don’t copy existing drugs or, as he puts it in pharmaceutical industry vernacular, “we don’t make ‘me too’ drugs.” And he wants the compounds to be made from molecules that don’t exist yet, not even in nature.

It’s a tall order, but one with the potential for life-altering improvements for people plagued with two medically perplexing neurological disorders, Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

Dr. Weaver isn’t interested in treating the symptoms of these diseases—there are already drugs that can do that—he wants to obliterate the root cause.

“Alzheimer’s develops due to the clumping of beta-amyloid peptides in the brain, which causes deterioration and dementia,” says Dr. Weaver, Dalhousie’s Canada Research Chair in Clinical Neuroscience. “An anti-clumping drug could stop further brain damage at the very onset of the disease, leaving the patient with minimal memory loss rather than with a condition that will worsen over time.”

“We are working to design a pioneering ‘anti-epileptogenic’ drug that could be given when the brain injury first occurs to prevent the subsequent formation of a seizure focus, and hence preventing epilepsy.”

His research team is pursuing this same early curative approach in efforts to prevent epilepsy from developing in people who have suffered brain injury. When someone has a brain injury, they may develop epilepsy, but frequently this is two or three years later.

The epilepsy develops due to the formation of a seizure focus, a process Weaver describes as “a misfiring of cells that short-circuit a small part of the brain.” The currently available anti-seizure drugs are used to symptomatically suppress the seizures only after the person has developed epilepsy.

“We are working to design a pioneering ‘anti-epileptogenic’ drug that could be given when the brain injury first occurs to prevent the subsequent formation of a seizure focus, and hence preventing epilepsy,” says Dr. Weaver, who is the also the president of Epilepsy Canada.

His teams’ innovation is supported by state-of-the-art computational facilities that help in designing drugs. It allows for molecular modelling, where the behaviour of a molecule can be mimicked. When the goal is to create a novel chemical structure, the technology capacity to generate vast calculations is an absolute necessity.

Dr. Weaver continues to practice medicine as he splits his research time between his epilepsy and Alzheimer’s drug discovery research teams.