Alzheimer’s “vaccine” seen to help mice

A vac­cine might blunt or even pre­vent the dead­ly, mem­o­ry-robbing dev­asta­t­ion of Alz­heim­er’s dis­ease, a study has found.

Sci­en­tists im­mu­nized mice with a mol­e­cule thought to play role in the ill­ness. The treated mice, they said, showed bet­ter cog­ni­tive per­for­mance than un­vac­ci­nat­ed mice, and a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in the build-up of pro­tein plaques be­lieved to cause brain cell death and dys­func­tion in Alz­hei­m­er’s.

“These re­sults are ex­tremely ex­cit­ing,” said Jor­dan Tang of the Ok­la­ho­ma Med­i­cal Re­search Founda­t­ion, a non­prof­it re­search in­sti­tute, who led the stu­dy. The find­ings ap­pear in The Jour­nal of the Federa­t­ion of Amer­i­can So­ci­eties for Ex­pe­ri­men­tal Bi­ol­o­gy.

Alzheimer’s grad­u­ally rav­ages vic­tims’ mem­o­ries and per­son­al­ities by kill­ing brain cells. The dis­ease af­fects more than 5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans, in­clud­ing near­ly half the popula­t­ion over 85, ac­cord­ing to the Alz­hei­mer’s As­socia­t­ion.

Tang and col­leagues pre­vi­ously had iden­ti­fied a mol­e­cule—an en­zyme called me­map­sin 2—that cuts a pro­tein in­to frag­ments which, in turn, are be­lieved to cause Alz­heim­er’s. In the new stu­dy, the group used me­map­sin 2 as a vac­cine for mice ge­net­ic­ally en­gi­neered to de­vel­op Alz­hei­mer’s symp­toms. The mice “de­vel­oped 35 per­cent few­er plaques,” said Tang.

Tang’s previous work al­so has led to the crea­t­ion of an ex­pe­ri­men­tal drug that would treat Alzheimer’s by in­hibit­ing me­map­sin 2. Hu­man clin­i­cal tri­als on that be­gan last sum­mer. Tang said a vac­cine would be a sup­ple­ment to, not a sub­sti­tute for, oth­er treat­ments of this na­ture. “Alz­hei­mer’s is a com­pli­cat­ed, mul­ti­faceted dis­ease,” he said. “We can­not rely on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strat­e­gy, be­cause what works in one pa­tient will not nec­es­sarily work in anoth­er.”

Vac­cina­t­ion strate­gies, de­signed to stim­u­late the im­mune sys­tem to fight the plaques, have been con­sid­ered a prom­is­ing way for­ward, but their suc­cess has been lim­it­ed, Tang said. In 2002, for ex­am­ple, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny Elan halted tri­als of a dif­fer­ent vac­cine af­ter 15 pa­tients suf­fered swell­ing of the cen­tral nerv­ous sys­tem.

But the new vac­cine “stim­u­lates the im­mune sys­tem more gently than pre­vi­ous Alz­hei­mer’s vac­cines, so we are op­ti­mis­tic about its prospects,” said Ste­phen Pres­cott, pres­ident of the founda­t­ion in Ok­la­ho­ma ­city. The next step, said Tang, will be to prog­ress to­ward hu­man tri­als. “There cur­rently is no ef­fec­tive treat­ment for Alz­heim­er’s dis­ease,” he not­ed, “so we must ex­plore eve­ry pos­si­ble op­tion.”

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071113_alzheimer.htm

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.