Heba M. Mansour, Neuroscience cover competition 2022 winner, during her Master thesis, Cairo University, Giza City, Egypt.
IBRO is delighted to announce that the winner of this year’s Neuroscience Cover Competition is Ms. Heba M. Mansour from Egyptian Drug Authority, Egypt.
The winning cover was featured in Volume 469C on 10 August 2021 along with the article, ‘Potential Repositioning of Anti-cancer EGFR Inhibitors in Alzheimer’s Disease: Current Perspectives and Challenging Prospects‘ in our flagship journal Neuroscience. The related article within the winning issue is a collaboration with Hala M.Fawzy, Aiman S.El-Khatib and Mahmoud M.Khattab.
- The science behind the winning cover image:
Neuroscience, Volume 469
The failure of clinical trials of novel drugs for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) strongly recommends the importance of finding new uses for existing drugs or drug repositioning strategies. The close observation of a relationship between cancer and AD may direct cancer kinases for targeting AD.
Over the past decades, kinase inhibitors have been intensively studied as therapeutic approaches for cancer treatment. Several studies have been published recently showing neuroprotective effects of receptor tyrosine kinase-epidermal growth factor receptor (RTK-EGFR) inhibitors in ameliorating pathological and behavioral features of AD in different models. In a recently published article in nature communication Journal, machine learning identifies some anti-cancer kinase inhibitors such as lapatinib ditosylate as potential drugs for AD. This finding accords with our recently published research in Experimental Neurology Journal. In this research, our research team investigated, for the first time, the potential repositioning of lapatinib ditosylate in an experimental AD rat model. Lapatinib ameliorated behavioral and pathological hallmarks of AD through suppression of amyloidogenesis, tauopathy, neuroinflammation, excitotoxicity, astrogliosis, oxidative stress, along with activation of autophagy and pro-survival pathways.
These findings can be of interest for drug companies or researchers that focus on artificial intelligence-based drug repositioning. However, a rapidly evolving field of repositioning EGFR inhibitors has many challenges and future limitations which are discussed in detail in our perspective article. To this end, the field of repositioning of anti-cancer tyrosine kinase inhibitors for AD is emerging as a challenging area to develop disease-modifying therapies.
IBRO and Elsevier are delighted for awarding Ms.Heba’s work and look forward for future research discoveries. Furthermore, it would be our greatest joy to also reveal the person behind the cover to our community. To this regard we have prepared an interview with the author of the cover that will be published in the near future so follow us for new exciting details on this topic!
For this contest, IBRO Neuroscience Publications Committee created a shortlist of three 2022 Neuroscience covers. The public was then asked to vote on their favourite cover in an online poll via social media. The campaign ran for one month and the cover was designated the winner with nearly 600 votes.
