Word: amyloid
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...target is a rogue protein known as beta amyloid, which forms the plaques that fill the brain's memory centers; just two weeks ago scientists identified one of the enzymes that are key to its formation. Another is an abnormal variant of the tau protein, which is thought to clutter the interiors of nerve cells with threadlike tangles. Over the coming years, as a new generation of Alzheimer's drugs enters the clinical pipeline, the arguments that rage today over which is more important, beta amyloid or tau, may be resolved. Kosik suspects that both may be critical...
...severity of symptoms. But by 2025, control could come to resemble a cure. For Alzheimer's has something in common with other brain disorders such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and mad-cow disease. Like them, it appears to be caused by misfolded proteins--in this case, beta amyloid and tau. And so one day in the 21st century it may become possible to vanquish Alzheimer's with a vaccine that targets these miscreants, or a new class of drugs that prevents them from forming. Kosik even has a name for these drugs--"broad-spectrum anti-aggregates," he calls them...
...block the activity of the AIDS virus. That potential target is called beta-secretase. It had long been postulated to act as a chemical scissors that helps snip away pieces of excess protein protruding from brain cells, thereby creating the debris that gathers into the toxic plaques called amyloid. The accumulation of these fibrous clumps in the brain of Alzheimer's patients is the likeliest reason for their inexorable decline...
...Martin Citron. In 1997, shortly after he moved from Harvard to Amgen, in Thousand Oaks, Calif., he and his team began a long, painstaking elimination process by inserting active human genes, in strings of 100 at a time, into living bacterial cells. When the team found cells making more amyloid protein than might have been expected, it narrowed the strings to 20 genes and repeated the process. Finally, the Amgen team zeroed in on the single gene responsible for producing the extra amyloid. Having found the culprit, the researchers went on to "grow" the enzyme in their little bacterial factories...
...this remains to be discovered. The most important thing to take away from this research news is that it's a "proof of concept," as scientists call it. Before now, they weren't sure they could dissolve amyloid plaques outside a test tube. Now they know they can. Even if vaccination turns out not to be the best route, researchers have a direction in which to concentrate their efforts. And sometimes in science, that's all you need...