A new study published in the journal Neuron found that taking a pill that prevents the accumulation of toxic molecules in the brain might someday help prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease.
According to researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the study took a three-pronged approach to help subdue early events that occur in the brain long before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are evident.
“Common diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia are caused in part by abnormal accumulation of certain proteins in the brain,” said senior author Dr. Huda Zoghbi, director of the Jan and Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s. “Some proteins become toxic when they accumulate and they make the brain vulnerable to degeneration.”
Tau is one of those proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. When tau accumulates as the person ages, it increases the vulnerability of the brain to developing Alzheimer’s.
“Scientists in the field have been focusing mostly on the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” said first author Dr. Cristian Lasagna-Reeves, postdoctoral fellow in the Zoghbi lab. “Here we tried to find clues about what is happening at the very early stages of the illness, before clinical irreversible symptoms appear, with the intention of preventing or reducing those early events that lead to devastating changes in the brain decades later.”
To find out which enzymes affected tau accumulation, the scientists inhibited about 600 enzymes called kinases one by one and found one, called Nuak1, whose inhibition resulted in reduced levels of tau.
By confirming this discovery in three different experiments – in fruit flies, mice and human cells – the researchers said the next step is to develop drugs that will block the production of Nuak1.
“If we can find drugs that can keep tau at levels that are not toxic for the brain, we would be able to prevent or delay the development of Alzheimer’s and other diseases caused in part by toxic tau accumulation,” Zoghbi said.
Click here to read the joint Baylor and Texas Children’s news release for more details on this study.