Star-like glial cells in red surround alpha beta plaques in the cortex of a mouse with a model of Alzheimer's Disease. Credit: Strittmatter lab/Yale
Memory and as well as connections between brain cells were restored in mice with a model of Alzheimer's given an experimental cancer drug, Yale School of Medicine researchers reported in the journal Annals of Neurology.
The drug, AZD05030, developed by Astra Zeneca proved disappointing in treating solid tumors but appears to block damage triggered during the formation of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The new study, funded by an innovative National Institutes of Health (NIH) program to test failed drugs on different diseases, has led to the launch of human trials to test the efficacy of AZD05030 in Alzheimer's patients.
"With this treatment, cells under bombardment by beta amyloid plaques show restored synaptic connections and reduced inflammation, and the animal's memory, which was lost during the course of the disease, comes back," said Stephen M. Strittmatter, the Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and senior author of the study.
In the last five years, scientists have developed a more complete understanding of the complex chain of events that leads to Alzheimer's disease. The new drug blocks one of those molecular steps, activation of the enzyme FYN, which leads to the loss of synaptic connections between brain cells. Several other steps in the disease process have the potential to be targets for new drugs, Strittmatter said.
"The speed with which this compound moved to human trials validates our New Therapeutic Uses program model and serves our mission to deliver more treatments to more patients more quickly," said Christopher P. Austin, M.D., director of NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which funded the work.
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Star-like glial cells in red surround alpha beta plaques in the cortex of a mouse with a model of Alzheimer's Disease. Credit: Strittmatter lab/Yale
Memory and as well as connections between brain cells were restored in mice with a model of Alzheimer's given an experimental cancer drug, Yale School of Medicine researchers reported in the journal Annals of Neurology.
The drug, AZD05030, developed by Astra Zeneca proved disappointing in treating solid tumors but appears to block damage triggered during the formation of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The new study, funded by an innovative National Institutes of Health (NIH) program to test failed drugs on different diseases, has led to the launch of human trials to test the efficacy of AZD05030 in Alzheimer's patients.
"With this treatment, cells under bombardment by beta amyloid plaques show restored synaptic connections and reduced inflammation, and the animal's memory, which was lost during the course of the disease, comes back," said Stephen M. Strittmatter, the Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and senior author of the study.
In the last five years, scientists have developed a more complete understanding of the complex chain of events that leads to Alzheimer's disease. The new drug blocks one of those molecular steps, activation of the enzyme FYN, which leads to the loss of synaptic connections between brain cells. Several other steps in the disease process have the potential to be targets for new drugs, Strittmatter said.
"The speed with which this compound moved to human trials validates our New Therapeutic Uses program model and serves our mission to deliver more treatments to more patients more quickly," said Christopher P. Austin, M.D., director of NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which funded the work.
Explore further: Immune cells are an ally, not enemy, in battle against Alzheimer's
Medical Xpress on facebook
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Alzheimer's missing link found
Yale School of Medicine researchers have discovered a protein that is the missing link in the complicated chain of events that lead to Alzheimer's disease, they report in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Neuron. Researchers also f ...
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Beta-amyloid is a sticky protein that aggregates and forms small plaques in the brains of the elderly and is thought to be a cause of Alzheimer's disease. Because specialized immune cells always surround ...
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A new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has revealed that a single dose of an immunotherapy reverses memory problems in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease. The article appears in the March ...
Neurogeneticists harness immune cells to clear Alzheimer's-associated plaques
New research from scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) shows that the body's immune system may be able to clear the brain of toxic plaque build-up that ...
Researchers find new piece in Alzheimer's puzzle
Yale researchers have filled in a missing gap on the molecular road map of Alzheimer's disease. In the Feb. 26 issue of the journal Nature, the Yale team reports that cellular prion proteins trigger the process by which ...
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In their latest brain imaging study on women at risk for Alzheimer's disease, York University researchers have found deterioration in the pathways that serve to communicate signals between different brain regions needed for ...
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After six years of painstaking research, a UCLA-led team has validated the first standardized protocol for measuring one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease—the atrophy of the part of the brain ...
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(HealthDay)—Doctors are not telling a majority of their patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's that they have the degenerative brain disease, a new report by the Alzheimer's Association indicates.
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By examining more than 3,600 postmortem brains, researchers at Mayo Clinic's campuses in Jacksonville, Florida, and Rochester, Minnesota, have found that the progression of dysfunctional tau protein drives ...
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