Is aspirin a 'master pill' for all ills?

A new study has provided some key insights into aspirin's disease-fighting abilities.

Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), in collaboration with colleagues at Rutgers University and San Raffaele University and Research Institute have found that salicylic acid targets the activities of HMGB1, an inflammatory protein associated with a wide variety of diseases, offering hope that more powerful aspirin-like drugs may be developed.

Aspirin is one of the oldest and most commonly used medicines, but many of its beneficial health effects have been hard for scientists and physicians to explain. A recent study shows that aspirin's main breakdown product, salicylic acid, blocks HMGB1, which may explain many of the drug's therapeutic properties.

This protein, HMGB1, is associated with many prevalent, devastating diseases in humans, including rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, sepsis and inflammation-associated cancers, such as colorectal cancer and mesothelioma, said senior author Daniel Klessig.

Aspirin's pain relieving effects have long been attributed to its ability to block the enzymes cyclooxygenase 1 and 2, which produce prostaglandins, hormone-like compounds that cause inflammation and pain, a discovery that netted its discoverer, John Vane, a Nobel prize. However, the body rapidly converts aspirin to salicylic acid, which is a much less effective inhibitor of cyclooxygenase 1 and 2 than aspirin. Nonetheless, it has similar pharmacological effects as aspirin, suggesting that salicylic acid may interact with additional proteins.

"Some scientists have suggested that salicylic acid should be called 'vitamin S', due to its tremendous beneficial effects on human health, and I concur," said lead author Hyong Woo Choi.

Researchers discovered the interaction between salicylic acid and HMGB1 by screening extracts prepared from human tissue culture cells to find proteins that could bind to salicylic acid. They identified one of these proteins as HMGB1. These screens have also identified a key suspect in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, plus approximately two dozen additional candidates that have yet to be characterized.

The study appears in the journal Molecular Medicine.