NeuralCipher Research overview
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Background: Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington's disease (HD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), differ in etiology but share several convergent pathological mechanisms. Pterostilbene (PTR) is a natural stilbene with reported antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective properties. This study aimed to prioritize putative PTR-associated targets and biological processes potentially relevant to shared neurodegenerative mechanisms. Methods: An integrative in silico workflow combining network pharmacology, protein-protein interaction (PPI) analysis, GO Biological Process (GO BP) enrichment, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations was applied. GO BP terms were filtered, focused on neurodegeneration- and neuroprotection-related processes, and subjected to REVIGO-based redundancy reduction. Selected targets were further evaluated by docking and 500 ns MD simulations. Results: A total of 181, 165, 128, and 109 shared PTR-disease targets were identified for AD, PD, HD, and ALS, respectively. Redundancy-reduced GO BP analysis indicated associations with neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and reactive oxygen species-related responses, programmed cell death, MAPK/ERK- and PI3K/AKT-related signaling, ion and calcium transport, and lipid-, steroid-, or hormone-associated regulation. PPI topology prioritized SRC, ESR1, and HSP90AA1 as recurrent hub-bottleneck proteins, whereas MD-based structural interpretation focused on ESR1 and HSP90AA1. MD analyses indicated stable PTR interactions with both proteins, with ESR1 showing the most favorable predicted interaction profile. Conclusions: These findings suggest that PTR may interact with shared neurodegeneration-relevant molecular systems, particularly through ESR1- and HSP90AA1-associated mechanisms. However, the results are exclusively computational and should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating, requiring further experimental validation.
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