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Sharp focus on Alzheimer's may help target drugs
Topic Started: 6 Jul 2017, 01:10 AM (75 Views)
skibboy
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Sharp focus on Alzheimer's may help target drugs

By James Gallagher
Health and science reporter, BBC News website

6 hours ago

Posted Image

Abnormal deposits that build up in the brain during Alzheimer's have been pictured in unprecedented detail by UK scientists.

The team at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology says its findings "open up a whole new era" in neurodegenerative disease.

Their work should make it easier to design drugs to stop brain cells dying.

The researchers used brain tissue from a 74-year-old woman who died after having Alzheimer's disease.

The form of dementia leads to tangles of a protein called tau spreading throughout the brain.

The more tau tangles there are, the worse the symptoms tend to be.

Doctors have known this has happened for decades but what has been missing is a detailed understanding of what the tangles look like.

The team took advantage of the "resolution revolution" in microscopy to take thousands of highly detailed images of the tau inside the woman's brain tissues.

And using computer software, they figured out the tangles look like this:

Posted Image

It is pretty meaningless to an untrained eye, but to scientists this could be one of the most important recent discoveries in tackling dementia.

Attempts to develop a drug to slow the pace of dementia have been met by repeated failure.

But it is hard to come up with a drug when you do not know the precise chemical structure of what you are targeting.

Dr Sjors Scheres, one of the researchers, told the BBC News website: "It's like shooting in the dark - you can still hit something but you are much more likely to hit if you know what the structure is.

"We are excited - it opens up a whole new era in this field, it really does."

Similar dysfunctional proteins are found in many brain diseases.

Alzheimer's also has beta amyloid while Parkinson's has alpha synuclein.

The structure of tau, published in the journal Nature, is the first to be determined in such detail.

Fellow researcher Dr Michel Goedert told the BBC: "This is a big step forward as far as tau goes but it is bigger than that.

"This is the first time anybody has determined the high-resolution structure [from human brain samples] for any of these diseases.

"The next step is to use this information to study the mechanisms of neurodegeneration."

Dr Tara Spires-Jones, from the centre for cognitive and neural systems at the University of Edinburgh, said the findings "substantially advance what we know".

She added: "These results will be useful for developing molecules to detect tau tangles in patients and potentially for developing treatments."

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skibboy
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Blood test finds toxic Alzheimer's proteins

By James Gallagher
Health and science correspondent, BBC News

5 hours ago

Posted Image

Scientists in Japan and Australia have developed a blood test that can detect the build-up of toxic proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease.

The work, published in the journal Nature, is an important step towards a blood test for dementia.

The test was 90% accurate when trialled on healthy people, those with memory loss and Alzheimer's patients.

Experts said the approach was at an early stage and needed further testing, but was still very promising.

Brain scans

Alzheimer's disease starts years before patients have any symptoms of memory loss.

The key to treating the dementia will be getting in early before the permanent loss of brain cells.

This is why there is a huge amount of research into tests for Alzheimer's.

One method is to look for a toxic protein - called amyloid beta - that builds up in the brain during the disease.

It can be detected with brain scans, but these are expensive and impractical.

'Major implications'

The new approach, a collaboration among universities in Japan and Australia, looks for fragments of amyloid that end up in the blood stream.

By assessing the ratios of types of amyloid fragment, the researchers could accurately predict levels of amyloid beta in the brain.

Significantly, the study shows it is possible to look in the blood to see what is happening in the brain.

Dr Abdul Hye, from King's College London, said: "This study has major implications as it is the first time a group has shown a strong association of blood plasma amyloid with brain and cerebrospinal fluid."

Early stages

The test is cheaper than brain scanning, "potentially enabling broader clinical access and efficient population screening", according to the study.

At the moment there is no treatment to change the course of Alzheimer's, so any test would have limited use for patients.

However, it could be useful in clinical trials.

Prof Tara Spires-Jones, from the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, at the University of Edinburgh, said: "These data are very promising and may be incredibly useful in the future, in particular for choosing which people are suited for clinical trials and for measuring whether amyloid levels are changed by treatments in trials."

Dr Hye added: "Considering Alzheimer's disease has a very long pre-clinical phase, a truer test will be how well this test performs in independent, healthy, cognitively normal individuals or even in individuals in the early stages of the disease."

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