Initial Results Reported from a Phase 1 Safety Trial of a Tau Vaccine

Alzheimer's disease is both an amyloidosis and a tauopathy; its symptoms are produced by some combination of the presence of solid deposits of misfolded amyloid-β and tau protein, though there is much debate over which is more important and how they interact with one another and brain cells in order to produce pathology. Effective treatment will probably involve removing both amyloid-β and tau aggregates from brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid. So far the best class of approach, and the one with the most funding behind it at the present, is immunotherapy, engineering the immune system to attack and remove the unwanted waste. Even that has proven to be much harder than expected, however, and the field is littered with failed trials and promising implementations that did not translate from animal studies to human biochemistry. Only recently have human trials produced meaningful results in amyloid clearance, and earnest efforts to remove tau from the brain started later and have less funding. Still, there is progress towards immunotherapies that can clear tau, as noted here: So far, many of the antibody drugs proposed to treat Alzheimer's disease target only the amyloid plaques. Despite the latest clinical trial that is hailed as our best chance in the quest for treating Alzheimer's, all later phase trials have failed with many causing severe side effects in the patients, such as abnormal accumulation of fluid and inflammation in the brain. One of the reasons for si...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs