To most people, mice are little more than cute critters or household annoyances but to others they hold the keys to our memory.
Researchers at the University of Alberta recently discovered a drug that may eventually be able to restore memory in an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain cells.
Jack Jhamandas’s research team tested the memory of brain cells of mice by giving the cells electrical shocks.
He said the cells were taken from the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memorizing.
Some of them were healthy, while others were infected with Alzheimer’s disease.
After injecting the infected cells with a drug called AC253, Jhamandas said they showed signs of remembering the shocks.
“When we applied this drug to the brain cells we were able to restore the memory trace to levels that you would see in normal animals of that age,” Jhamandas said.
“What it tells us is that although in those animals the diminution of memory was due to amyloids in the brain, you can potentially reverse that with this drug.”
Amyloids are a type of protein, found to cause significant memory reduction in the brain.
Jhamandas said his research started when his team found that amyloid is similar to another protein, amylin, which is found in diabetes patients and commonly treated with AC253.
While both proteins exist in different parts of the body, they have a lot of similarities, Jhamandas said.
“Think of a keyhole – both the amyloid and the amylin can open the door. And there are drugs based on amylin that can block the keyhole,” he said.
“If you block the keyhole for amylin, you can maybe also block the bad effects of amyloid.”
According to a 2012 report by the Alzheimer Society of Canada, drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s disease help to delay and slow it, but don’t cure it. Oftentimes, they don’t work on everybody and must be discontinued due to side effects.
The disease is most often diagnosed in people 65 and older. It can begin to develop well before signs appear, even as early as age 40.
In 2011, 747,000 Canadians lived with dementia. By 2031, this number is expected to reach 1.4 million.
It’s difficult to accurately detect Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. Some recommended tests are routine brain imaging to reveal shrinkages, examination of protein levels, genetic testing and psychological testing.
But these tests are largely used to confirm the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages and to pick out those patients who most likely progress to the full-blown disease.
The society hopes that coming years will provide more research to diagnose Alzheimer’s ahead of its outbreak.
Jhamanda said he is hoping that AC253 could help with that.
He does, however, caution that one drug alone may not hold the key to stopping the disease.
“Alzheimer’s is a very complex and complicated disease and the medical field is littered with debris of failed drugs and approaches to treat this condition,” he said.
“We are going to need several approaches and several compounds but this research at least provides us with an avenue that is potentially useful and may help our patients in the future.”
Over the next year Jhamandas will begin testing the drug on newborn mice that are genetically modified to develop Alzheimer’s after six months, to see if he can stop the disease’s development ahead of time.
If his tests prove successful, he expects to begin human trials in approximately five years. Until then, he hopes to find the solution to another problem: crossing the blood-brain barrier.
“The flipside is that the drugs we use don’t get into the brain so we would have to develop drugs that are based on this compound (AC523) and have the ability to cross over,” he said.
“But I feel comfortable that this won’t be a big step because there were many other instances were there were drugs developed that could cross into the brain.”
