A team of UK and German scientists has developed a new approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and a vaccine for it.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia especially in the UK, which affects brain functioning, memory loss and leads to other mental abilities. Thus, this study is a major breakthrough in the study of the disease.
Its head, Professor Thomas Bayer from the University Medical Center Göttingen, wrote the paper ‘Discovery of a Novel Pseudo-β-hairpin Structure of N-truncated Amyloid-β for Use as a Vaccine against Alzheimer’s Disease’ that was published in Molecular Psychiatry.
An excerpt from it reads:
Here we report the discovery of a unique conformational epitope in the N-terminal region of Aβ, which offers new routes for active and passive immunization against AD… we have developed a novel AD vaccine with unique features not related to any other vaccine or antibody in clinical development.
The researchers discovered an antibody-based Alzheimer’s treatment and developed a protein-based vaccine that minimizes symptoms of the ailment in mice.
Now they are looking for a commercial partner to take the therapeutic antibody and the vaccine through clinical trials, after which its availability will become a possibility.
Professor Bayer said,
In clinical trials, none of the potential treatments which dissolve amyloid plaques in the brain have shown much success in terms of reducing Alzheimer’s symptoms. Some have even shown negative side effects. So, we decided on a different approach. We identified an antibody in mice that would neutralize the truncated forms of soluble amyloid-beta but would not bind either to normal forms of the protein or to the plaques.
The researchers then tested the ‘humanized’ antibody and the engineered amyloid-beta vaccine TAPAS in two different mouse models of the disease and found that the antibody and vaccine aid the restoration of neuron function, enhance glucose metabolism in the brain, minimize amyloid-beta plaque formation, and restore memory loss.
