Image showing how the heart tissue of a normal wild type mouse (left) compares to a mouse lacking the protein MKK6 (right). Image credit: Bárbara González-Terán (CC BY 4.0)
The human heart can increase its size to supply more blood to the body’s organs. This process, called hypertrophy, can happen during exercise or be caused by medical conditions, such as high blood pressure or inherited genetic diseases. If hypertrophy is continually driven by illness, this can cause the heart to fail and no longer be able to properly pump blood around the body.
For hypertrophy to happen, several molecular changes occur in the cells responsible for contracting the heart, including activation of the p38 pathway. Within this pathway is a p38 enzyme as well as a series of other proteins which are sequentially turned on in response to stress, such as inflammatory molecules or mechanical forces that alter the cell’s shape.
There are different types of p38 enzyme which have been linked to other diseases, making them a promising target for drug development. However, clinical trials blocking individual members of the p38 family have had disappointing results. An alternative approach is to target other proteins involved in the p38 pathway, such as MKK6, but it is not known what effect this might have.
To investigate, Romero-Becerra et al. genetically modified mice to not have any MKK6 protein. As a result, these mice had a shorter lifespan, with hypertrophy developing at a young age that led to heart problems. Romero-Becerra et al. used different mice models to understand why this happened, showing that a lack of MKK6 reduces the activity of a specific member of the p38 family called p38α. However, this blockage boosted a different branch of the pathway which involved two other p38 proteins, p38γ and p38δ. This, in turn, triggered another key pathway called mTOR which also promotes hypertrophy of the heart.
These results suggest that drugs blocking MKK6 and p38α could lead to side effects that cause further harm to the heart. A more promising approach for treating hypertrophic heart conditions could be to inhibit p38γ and/or p38δ. However, before this can be fully explored, further work is needed to generate compounds that specifically target these proteins.
