Word: developable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When it comes to Alzheimer's disease, there hasn't been much to celebrate in recent years. Efforts to develop a vaccine against the brain disorder have stalled, and no drugs have been able to reverse the slow death of neurons that robs people of their memories and thoughts. For the first time in many years, however, researchers in the field are genuinely excited about the potential for effective drug treatments and helpful new risk factors...
...disease is a complex pathologic process, and that is daunting," says Dr. Ronald Petersen, chair of the Alzheimer's Association's medical and scientific advisory council and director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. "But now we are beginning to segregate out different therapeutic targets and develop drugs that have an impact on each target, so in combination they may handle the disease better than any single approach...
...more discoveries are made, researchers hope they'll develop a better understanding of who is most at risk of Alzheimer's disease, how each patient's case is unique, and how best to treat specific patients with the drug and lifestyle changes that will be most effective for them. Taken together, these approaches could one day make the long goodbye of Alzheimer's a thing of the past...
There are other, more immediate payoffs of the new study. For one thing, it gives researchers a better understanding of how ALS progresses. Because the new nerve cells have the same genetic makeup as the patients' own diseased cells, Henderson says, they may very well develop signs of the disease in culture, allowing researchers to watch ALS unfold before they eyes. "Our lack of understanding of the disease process is preventing us from developing more efficient cures," says Henderson. "Because the disease is happening in the spinal cord, we don't have access to living samples of neurons undergoing...
This method takes regular human cells—in this case skin cells—and uses viruses to reprogram them into cells that can develop into any kind of human tissue, in theory providing all the benefits of embryonic stem cells...