Two Examples of Recent Work on Novel Drug Candidates to Treat Alzheimer ' s Disease

Absent any greater context on Alzheimer's disease research, one might look back at the past twenty years of clinical trials and consider this medical condition to be an insurmountable obstacle at our present stage of progress in biotechnology. The history is an unremitting series of abject and expensive failures. The underlying context is more promising, however - Alzheimer's research is the sharp, applied end of two massive, distributed research projects that are still somewhere in their middle stages. The first of these is the effort to map and understand the biochemistry and cellular function of the brain in detail. The second is the effort to produce functional, safe, reliable immunotherapies, which in turn requires researchers to map and understand the biochemistry and cellular function of the immune system in detail. At some point, immunotherapies to remove the protein aggregates associated with Alzheimer's will start to work, as tremendous progress has been made in the underlying understanding of the brain and the immune system over the past decade or two. Early signs of that stage of progress emerged last year, but they are still only early signs. Failure has consequences, however. As the primary focus of amyloid clearance continues to fail to produce results, it is the case that ever more effort and funding flows in other directions. Some of these are quite promising and genuinely new approaches that have yet to be fully explored, such as restoration of lost d...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs