Loss of fear factor makes timid ...( Together with his lab's previous work o...)

Together with his lab's previous work on GRP, Kandel said, the work advances the understanding or learned fear versus instinctive fear in several ways. "It shows genetically there's a fundamental difference between the two; it gives you some insight into the neural circuitry; it shows that there's an inhibitory constraint to fear; and it gives you the potential of thinking of therapeutic targets."

As drug targets, Kandel said, GRP and stathmin each present unique opportunities. "One would be for learned anxiety, the other would be for instinctive. They both, I think, are reasonable no one has worked on those as targets before." While drugs targeting stathmin would likely affect both types of fear, Kandel expects that with further work, researchers should also be able to identify genes that act exclusively on instinctive fear.

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Contact: Jennifer Michalowski
michalow@hhmi.org
301-215-8576
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
18-Nov-2005

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