Twisted and tangled proteins are found in the brains of many people who die from Alzheimer’s disease. Some scientists suspect that these neural tangles can damage and even kill brain cells, but so far in clinical trials, drugs that have tried to target the tangles have had limited success.
A promising new drug has now been introduced by an international team, led by researchers from the University of Texas. The nasal spray can cross the blood-brain barrier and destroy tau protein tangles in live mice. The drug also works in the lab, removing tangles within and between human neurons.
The drug was specifically designed to recognize and destroy the most toxic form of tau proteins, such as that seen in some cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
But this was not the only challenge. The researchers also had to figure out how to get the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain cells.
Neuroscientist Sagar Gaikwad and his team decided to package the drug into tiny bubbles that can pass through cell membranes. By spraying the drug on the mice’s noses, they managed to bypass the blood-brain barrier, writes ScienceAlert.
Neural knots that can damage and even kill brain cells
In aged mice with tau-associated brain diseases, a single spray was enough to clear toxic tau from the brain. Two weeks later, the mice showed improved cognitive function. Of course, this does not mean that the drug will have the same impact on humans.
In a review of the results for Science Translational Medicine, neuroscientists Soraya Meftah, Claire Durrant and Tara Spiers-Jones of the University of Edinburgh, who were not involved in the current study, note that while many tau-based therapies show promise in models animals, translating them into effective drugs for humans “has so far failed.”
Much more work is needed, but Gaikwad and his colleagues’ initial results are promising.
A promising drug
In experiments on postmortem human brain tissue donated from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and Pick’s disease (a form of frontotemporal dementia), the new antibody drug not only cleared your tangles, but also stopped the release of “seeds tau,” which travel through connected neurons to entangle proteins in other parts of the brain.
“Many open questions remain, including whether this intranasal treatment in humans will allow the antibody to penetrate in effective doses much higher into our brains, and whether there are potentially dangerous side effects such as inflammation, which is a concern in all targeted immunotherapy trials to amyloid,” write Meftah, Durrant and Spiers-Jones.
Gaikwad and his colleagues hope their technique will inspire further research into the treatment of tau-related diseases.
The study was published in Science Translational Medicine.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
