Common Mechanisms of Drug Interactions with Sodium and T-Type Calcium Channels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voltage-gated sodium (Na(v)) and calcium (Ca(v)) channels play important roles in physiological processes, including neuronal and cardiac pacemaker activity, vascular smooth muscle contraction, and nociception. They are thought to share a common ancestry, and, in particular, T-type calcium (T-type) channels share structural similarities with Na(v) channels, both with regard to membrane topology and with regard to gating kinetics, including rapid inactivation. We thus reasoned that certain drugs acting on Na(v) channels may also modulate the activities of T-type channels. Here we show that the specific Na(v)1.8 blocker 5-(4-chlorophenyl-N-(3,5-dimethoxyphenyl)furan-2-carboxamide (A803467) tonically blocks T-type channels in the low micromolar range. Similarly to Na(v)1.8, this compound causes a significant hyperpolarizing shift in the voltage dependence of inactivation and seems to promote a slow inactivation-like phenotype. We further hypothesized that the structural similarity between T-type and Na(v) channels may extend to structurally similar drug-binding sites. Sequence alignment revealed several highly conserved regions between T-type and Na(v) channels that corresponded to drug-binding sites known to alter voltage-dependent gating kinetics. Mutation of amino acid residues in this regions within human Ca(v)3.2 T-type channels altered A803467 blocking affinity severalfold, suggesting that these sites may be exploited for the design of mixed T-type and Na(v) channel blockers that could potentially act synergistically to normalize aberrant neuronal activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".