Inhibiting PRMT5 for heart failure

Inhibiting the arginine methyltransferase PRMT5 could help treat heart failure by blocking the epigenetic regulatory enzyme’s interaction with the transcription factor SMAD3, and subsequent gene-activating histone modifications that promote fibrotic gene transcription.

In a mouse model of pressure overload-induced heart failure, fibroblast-specific PRMT5 knockout increased left ventricular fractional shortening, and decreased cardiac fibrosis, the number of fibroblasts positive for markers of cardiac fibrosis progression, and expression of fibrosis-related genes compared with normal expression. ...