2019/12/17
Keio University School of Medicine
A research group from the Department of Ophthalmology, Keio University School of Medicine, led by Professor Kazuo Tsubota, Project Associate Professor Toshihide Kurihara, Visiting Researcher Yohei Tomita, and Assistant Professor Nobuhiro Ozawa, in collaboration with Kowa Company, Ltd. (Headquarters: Nagoya), has confirmed that pemafibrate (Parmodia®, Kowa Company, Ltd.), an antihyperlipidemic drug and selective peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (hereinafter, PPARα) modulator, significantly suppresses retinal pathological neovascularization in a mouse model of retinopathy.
Furthermore, they found that pemafibrate acts to suppress retinal neovascularization by enhancing the expression of fibroblast growth factor 21 (hereinafter, FGF21) in the liver and increasing plasma FGF21 levels.
These findings are a new discovery suggesting that pemafibrate has the potential to suppress retinopathy. It is hoped that further development of this finding will lead to a therapeutic drug to prevent blindness caused by retinopathy, which affects many people worldwide.
The results of this research were published in the online edition of the interdisciplinary general journal "International Journal of Molecular Sciences" on November 23 (Greenwich Mean Time).
Please see below for the full press release.