Word: amyloid
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...question we still need to resolve," muses neurogeneticist John Hardy of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., "is, What is the relationship between beta amyloid and tau?" That is why Hardy and others are so excited by the new strain of transgenic mice that scientists are breeding. By crossing mice that develop tangles with mice that develop plaques, they should finally be able to provide scientists with a research tool they've sorely lacked: lab animals that closely approximate the disease in humans...
BEYOND BETA AMYLOID...
Over the next several years, researchers can be expected to bring into increasingly sharp focus the enormously complicated molecular pathway of which beta amyloid and tau are just the most visible signposts, and in so doing they are likely to reveal a raft of new opportunities for therapeutic intervention. For example, a change in shape appears to be what makes tau go bad. Last year Davies and Harvard's Dr. Kun Ping Lu announced that they had found an enzyme that seemed to restore tau to its proper configuration...
...concentrating on a protein known as COX2, which they have shown rises steeply in the brains of patients in the very early stages of the disease. Cells produce COX2 in response to injury, observes Mount Sinai molecular psychiatrist Giulio Pasinetti, who believes it may be COX2--and not beta amyloid--that induces the inflammatory response characteristic of the disease. Anti-inflammatories, in other words, could shortly emerge not only as components of the therapeutic arsenal but also as agents of prevention...
...clues that point to other potential compounds. For as he notes, Alzheimer's disease, no less than heart disease and diabetes, will almost certainly be found to have multiple causes. For example, the genes implicated so far in early-onset Alzheimer's all lead to an overproduction of beta amyloid. But the genes involved in the bulk of cases, Selkoe strongly suspects, are more likely to do with faulty clearance mechanisms that aren't doing a good enough job flushing out the plaques. A sink can overflow, he observes, for two reasons--if the faucet is too wide...