Muscarinic acetylcholine receptor modulation in neurological diseases

Interviewer: Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors have long been proposed as promising targets for treating neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. But only recently, the first drug targeting these receptors has received clinical approval. In this interview, we are joined by Prof. Andrew Tobin, Director of the Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow to discuss ongoing challenges, recent breakthroughs and the potential for developing additional novel therapies based on our knowledge of these receptors. Prof. Tobin, thank you very much for joining us today. To kick things off, can you please tell us a little bit about why muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, particularly the M1 and the M4 subtypes have been considered promising targets for neurological disorders and what have been the main barriers to developing drugs targeting them over the past decades? Prof. Tobin: Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you today, and this opportunity to talk about my favorite subject which is muscarinic receptors. There has been a great deal of interest in these receptors for some decades now, and the primary reason for that is very early pharmacological data and indeed genetic data in mouse knockout studies that have indicated that certainly the M1 muscarinic receptor, and indeed, the M4 muscarinic receptor, as you all know, there are five subtypes of this G protein-coupled receptor family, M1 and M4 being the primary targets of interest for the treatment of symptomatic memory loss in Alzheimer's disease, and subsequently, for the correction of