Word: gammas
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Scott Krueger was found unconscious in the basement of MIT's Phi Gamma Delta fraternity with a blood alcohol level more than five times the legal driving limit. He died after three days in a coma. MIT has since banished Phi Gamma Delta from campus...
...Kruegers' lawyer, Leo V. Boyle, told the Boston Globe that the Kruegers will soon file a civil action suit against the local and national chapters of Phi Gamma Delta. Boyle said the settlement with MIT was unusual because the university apologized and gave monetary compensation even though the Kruegers neither sued nor promised the university confidentiality...
...other research teams, including one led by Selkoe, created yet another stir. They zeroed in on the elusive enzymes that snip the beta-amyloid fragment from the precursor protein. "We had the paper, and now we had the scissors," says Selkoe. If he is right, one of those scissors, gamma secretase, may actually be the presenilin-1 protein. Whatever the true identity of gamma secretase turns out to be, pharmaceutical companies are rushing to develop drugs that block it. Bristol-Myers Squibb has already started safety tests of one such compound and hopes to expand its study soon...
Many questions remain. For one thing, researchers are worried that gamma secretase may perform vital functions in the brain and that blocking it could cause serious side effects. Also, no one knows whether strategies aimed at lowering levels of beta amyloid will have any impact on the course of Alzheimer's disease--though if the beta-amyloid hypothesis is right, they should. Selkoe and other Amyloid People now see the disease process as a biochemical cascade; the event that triggers the cascade, they believe, is the accumulation of beta amyloid...
...brain and body (more on that later). But people who, for genetic reasons, tend to get Alzheimer's at an early age--in their 40s or 50s--seem to shape the protein into a stickier version that is more likely to clump together. By inhibiting an enzyme called gamma secretase, which facilitates amyloid production, researchers hope to push amyloid production so low that no new plaques will form...