Exercise Drug

Researchers have found that exercise triggers about 1,000 different molecular reactions, and they have now documented these reactions to create a comprehensive “exercise blueprint” of human muscle. With this roadmap, it should be possible to analyze the beneficial changes and develop therapeutic models for drugs that mimic exercise. Such drugs would be targeted at individuals suffering from a variety of diseases and disorders for whom exercise is not a viable treatment option, including those with neurological disorders, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

While it has long been known that exercise is a powerful therapy for many diseases, and that it produces a cascading series of responses within human muscle, the true complexity of these changes has not been fully understood until now. In a study of four healthy males, the researchers took biopsies of skeletal muscle following 10 minutes of high intensity exercise. Using mass spectrometry, they analyzed a process known as protein phosphorylation and discovered that a majority of the changes that occurred were previously not even associated with exercise.

Since prior research focused on a small subset of molecular changes, the drugs available today are generally designed to target individual molecules. This research proves that, in order to be effective, future therapies will need to target multiple pathways – and now we know what they are.