Experimental Drug Shows Potential Against Alzheimer’s Disease

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have designed an experimental drug that reversed key symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice. The drug works by reinvigorating a cellular cleaning mechanism that gets rid of unwanted proteins by digesting and recycling them. The study was published online today in the journal Cell.

“Discoveries in mice don’t always translate to humans, especially in Alzheimer’s disease,” says co-study leader Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases, professor of developmental and molecular biology, and co-director of the Institute for Aging Research at Einstein. “But we were encouraged to find in our study that the drop-off in cellular cleaning that contributes to Alzheimer’s in mice also occurs in people with the disease, suggesting that our drug may also work in humans.” In the 1990s, Dr. Cuervo discovered the existence of this cell-cleaning process, known as chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) and has published 200 papers on its role in health and disease.

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QUESTION: This is very encouraging. However, since our immune system tends to attack and encapsulate these deposits as they continue to build up (same as for cholesterol plaque), would dissolving them away leave behind a gossamer web of the cellular residue left by the immune system, which would then be at risk of breaking off and causing blood clots or obstruction in fine capillary structures downstream (lungs, kidneys) ?