SG-2: A promising lipolytic and pro-autophagic hit-compound to treat Alzheimer's disease

The identification of efficient pharmacological tools for treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) represents one of the main challenges of our century. Due to the complex etiopathology and the several biological processes resulting impaired in AD, the drug discovery process should focus on the development of new chemical entities able to target this multi-faceted impairment. We designed and synthetized a new analogue of 3-iodothyronamine, namely SG-2, which shares an interesting pleiotropic activity. Within this study, we explored SG-2 ability to promote beneficial effects in a C. Elegans model of AD, using a novel technique developed at Cambridge University, which exploits an automated system of high-resolution cameras to evaluate in parallel the motility of a huge number of nematodes (up to 5000 at time) in response to drug administration. Our results showed that SG-2 can promote lifespan and restores motility of worms back to the wildtype.