Potential Drug to Cure Alzheimer’s Disease
It seems that the news about the Alzheimer’s disease seem to fluctuate this year between good and bad. Scientists seem to make an optimistic discovery, only to find out that it does not work, and so on. The great news might come from Paul Greengard, and 84 year old scientists who received the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on signaling in brain cells.
He still works in his laboratory from Rockefeller University in New York City, 7 days a week. He lives very close to the office, walking there each day together with his companion Alpha, who is an aging Bernese mountain dog. Dr. Greengard became interested in the disease 25 years ago, when his father in law started to manifest the symptoms, and since then he managed to make some surprising discoveries in the domain. He created a philanthropic foundation that had the task of helping him with the study of the disease.
Thanks to these funds he was able to find out the protein which is required to create the beta amyloid, which is responsible for creating the telltale plaque that forms in the brains of the people who suffer from the disease. His finding will be published in a magazine on Thursday, and it could lead to the development of a drug which would have the potential of stopping the development of the protein. He performed lots of experiments and studies on mice. However that does not mean that the drug will be made official very soon. Eli Lilly’s drug was sold in stores, but it was later discovered that instead of making the disease better, it made it worse.
Dr. Paul Aisen, of the University of California, San Diego believes that the discoveries made by Dr. Greengard could have lots of potential because he considers that his work is very convincing. Dr. Aisen runs a program which is financed by the National Institute on Aging which is responsible for conducting clinical trials on various treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers on Alzheimer’s disease have exploded in the last period of time, as approximately 200 research papers are published each week. New tests and new scans appear very often, each of them having the purpose of developing new methods of detecting the disease from very early stages.
The companies are testing more than 100 drugs which they hope that might be able to treat the problem. Most of the drugs are based on the gamma secretase enzyme which has the potential of blocking the protein which causes the plaque to form in the brain. The protein is present in every brain, but in case of the people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, the protein is present in very large quantities. It is not known what the protein does, but it is believed that the protein can fight against infections and can kill microbes.
Many of the scientists believe that the main problem with the drug created by the Eli Lilly Company was that it completely stopped the protein, and as a result it damaged the brain. Since the protein was completely gone, it could not fight against certain microbes. Other companies have stated that their drugs do not attack the protein in such an aggressive manner as the one developed by Eli Lilly did, but they are afraid that other enzymes might be attacked by them as well. Dr. Greengard discovered the gamma secretase activating protein which tells the enzyme to make beta amyloid. He believes that if that protein can be stopped, then the beta amyloid will not be created, and as a result the people will not be affected.
It seems that the drug Gleevec which is currently on the market, and which has been created in order to fight against various types of cancer including leukemia has the capacity of attacking the protein discovered by Dr. Greengard. However the drug can not be used against the Alzheimer’s disease because it is eliminated from the brain as soon as it gets there. The scientists need to develop a drug which would be able to stay in the brain for longer periods of time and as a result which would be able to stop the protein for good.
Rudolph Tanzi, a neurology professor and Alzheimer’s researcher at Harvard Medical School stated that the scientists could develop a drug based on Gleevec. He believes that the scientists should modify the molecules of the drug in order to make it to stay in the brain for longer periods of time. He believes that such a task is possible, and on top of that, that it should not be too difficult to accomplish. Dr. Greengard remembers the time when he first started his work on finding a cure for the disease. He remembers that initially he believed that the disease is not too serious, that it would be very easy to cure it.
He and his students made one the initial discoveries for curing the disease ten years ago, when they realized that certain proteins could block the beta amyloid production. They performed various searches, trying to find out which drugs have the best capacity of stopping the production of beta amyloid, and they found that Gleevec had that potential. The drug completely stopped the production of that protein, but only for a very short while.
However, they discovered that if he pumped the drug directly into the brains of the mice, the beta amyloid would completely go away. Of course such a thing would not be possible on humans, as the process if very complicated, but that gave him some hope. The gamma secretase activating protein which he discovered belongs to the family of proteins called proteases. The proteases have the capacity of chopping proteins into smaller molecules. The problem is that the proteases are not very specific, as they can attack various proteins, which could cause lots of damage. He needed to find out a protein which would strictly attack the beta amyloid without attacking the other proteins. He did, and now he hopes that the drug will be on the market very soon.
