Alzheimer’s has been quietly destroying the brain for years. If you could open the skull, you would see dead neurons and accumulations of two characteristic proteins: amyloid and tau.
According to the Spanish-language daily, El Pais, an international team, including Spanish neuroscientist Amaia Arranz, has introduced 100,000 human neurons into the brains of mice to try to investigate in vivo what happens during the advance of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors have observed how the cells perish and have managed to avoid this neuronal death with a simple oral treatment. Their "breakthrough" was published Thursday in the journal Science.
Mice are not susceptible to Alzheimer’s, but the researchers genetically modified them to suffer from an accumulation of the amyloid protein. By introducing human neurons into the brains of these rodents, the scientists were able to identify the exact mechanism of neuronal destruction: activation of the MEG3 gene induces necroptosis, a genetically programmed cell death, which is also present in cancer. A drug approved for the treatment of leukemia, ponatinib, and another for melanoma, dabrafenib, prevented neuronal death in these mice. The anti-inflammatory necrosulfonamide achieves the same effect, the El Pais report said.
“There are still no drugs that cure or help alleviate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. This study could help to find therapies that prevent the loss of neuronal cells,” Arranz of the Achúcarro Basque Center for Neuroscience in Bilbao was quoted as saying by El Pais.
The work was carried out in the laboratory of Belgian biologist Bart De Strooper, of the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research (CBD).
Alzheimer's threatens to wipe out civilization in the coming decades — there are 10 million new cases of dementia every year — but the scientific community still has no idea what causes it.