Cyclosporine

Even dry eyes, bad dry eyes and some dry eyes is inflammatory.

That's why we have medications like cyclosporine drops or Restasis that seem to really help these patients.

So it's not exactly uveitis, but it's definitely related.

And as uveitis specialists, we see all these things.

Bacula viruses, a kind of virus that infects caterpillars, brainwashing them into climbing really high and then dissolving into glue, yeah really, already are being deployed for pest control in China, Europe, in the US and even Brazil.

And cyclosporine, a drug with its origins in a zombifying fungus, is helping prevent the rejection of transplanted organs.

Cyclosporine is related to cordyceps.

Yeah, cordyceps, the supervillain from The Last of Us, Pedro Pascal's greatest enemy.

It's also prized in traditional Chinese medicine to treat everything from fatigue to restoring kidney function.

Doesn't make sense.

Cyclosporine, methotrexate.

I mean, there's a ton of medications in dermatology that you need to be following something.

So these medications are arguably easier than medications that they use on a daily basis.

Decreased ATP production, cellular injury, death, and a whole cascade of downstream things that eventually lead to cell death, tissue injury, and things like that.

So I think one of the therapies that hopefully will gain more traction that we've been looking at for other injury models is cyclosporine.

Cyclosporine, obviously, I think most people are familiar with, have been traditionally used as an immunomodulator for transplant patients through a different pathway.

But in our particular model, we found that the use of cyclosporine early on in traumatic brain injury models in swine that actually prevents the opening of MPTP via cyclophilin D.

And so with this inhibition, it actually sort of modulates the opening of the spore, and then you get mitigation of injury that occurred at the mitochondria.

Statins, which allow us to not have heart attacks and strokes when we've too much cholesterol in our system, are derived from a fungus.

And Cyclosporine, which is an anti-rejection drug, it stops your body from rejecting a transplanted organ.

Without cyclosporine, probably a lot of the transplant surgery that takes place would not be able to happen.

So

Uh, next one was a thirty-two-year-old, asthma, alopecia universalis, did narrowband UVB, oral methotrexate at twenty milligrams a week.

Cyclosporine gave her renal impairment.

DUPI on thirty milligrams of Rinvoq.

She got down to EASI four point eight, but then it went back to EASI eight.

So, this was really born out of very, like, translational questions.

So cyclosporine is part of the standard therapy for aplastic anemia.

Cyclosporine is also a standard immunosuppressive drug that's given for a variety of different diseases.

It's pretty commonly used.

It does carry pretty important risks of serious side effects that actually sometimes can limit the ability to use it.

What drug was that?

Restasis.

Okay.

It's been around since the, the 2000s, maybe, I think, 2005 or 2007.

Any of the illicit drugs can cause secondary hypertension.

Cyclosporine, sirolimus, and tacrolimus.

These are very uncommon medications, but if you're, if you're taking one, if you're taking one, you realize, you recognize the name just then.

Buspar, used for depression and mental health issues, can absolutely cause secondary hypertension.