A High Level Tour of the Landscape of Alzheimer ' s Drug Development

The brain is a very complex organ, and thus the age-related failures of brain function also tend to be very complex. Alzheimer's disease receives the greatest attention from the research community, but is still only partially understood. The major focus of efforts over the past two decades has been on the clearance of amyloid-β aggregates from the brain, largely via immunotherapies, but a few other approaches have surfaced as well. Only in the past few years has this effort achieved success and resulted in large reductions in amyloid-β in patient brains, but unfortunately this did not result in a reversal of symptoms. The amyloid cascade hypothesis is the central dogma for the study of Alzheimer's disease: amyloid-β aggregation occurs slowly over time, setting up the conditions for the later, more harmful stage of neuroinflammation and tau aggregation. That amyloid-β clearance fails to help patients may indicate that amyloid-β becomes irrelevant in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease, or it may indicate that it is not actually central to the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Over the years of failure to make meaningful progress with clearance of amyloid-β, and especially now that clearance has failed to help patients, researchers have increasingly turned to other approaches. This is a field in the midst of profound change and loud debate. Given what has been discovered about the role of senescent cells in the aging brain in recent years, and the grow...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs