Integrated stress response key to seemingly disparate diseases?

The integrated stress response pathway is starting to garner interest as a therapeutic target in industry as preclinical evidence mounts that it could be behind a wide swath of conditions. But much remains unknown about how best to intervene in the pathway and when inhibition or enhancement is the better choice.

Five papers published in the past two months underscore the potential broad utility of the integrated stress response (ISR), adding five more diseases to the list of those in which the pathway may play a role: lung cancer, dystonia, a rare bacterial infection called necrotizing fasciitis, the inherited encephalopathy Aicardi-Goutières syndrome and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease...