An Alzheimer's Cure? Not So Fast.

The British press (and to a lesser extent, the US one) was full of reports the other day about some startling breakthrough in Alzheimer's research. We could certainly use one, but is this it? What would an Alzheimer's breakthrough look like, anyway? Given the complexity of the disease, and the difficulty of extrapolating from its putative animal models, I think that the only way you can be sure that there's been a breakthrough in Alzheimer's is when you see things happening in human clinical trials. Until then, things are interesting, or suggestive, or opening up new possibilities, what have you. But in this disease, breakthroughs happen in humans. This latest news is nowhere close. That's not to say it's not very interesting - it certainly is, and it doesn't deserve the backlash it'll get from the eye-rolling headlines the press wrote for it. The paper that started all this hype looked at mice infected with a prion disease, which led inexorably to neurodegeneration and death. They seem to have significantly slowed that degenerative cascade (details below), and that really is a significant result. The mechanism behind this, the "unfolded protein response" (UPR) could well be general enough to benefit a number of misfolded-protein diseases, which include Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's, among others. (If you don't have access to the paper, this is a good summary). The UPR, which is a highly conserved pathway, senses an accumulation of misfolded proteins inside th...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs