You will be redirected to:
Today, September 21st, is the World Alzheimer’s Day, so let’s do a quick review of the investigated therapeutic targets to find a cure to this pathology: Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia with approximatively 9.7 millions of patients in Europe. Its 2 main hallmarks in the brain are: amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques, and tau-proteins neurofibrillary tangles.
Logically, investigated treatments are aiming to act on either the Aβ or the tau proteins, to avoid the apparition of these undesired supramolecular aggregates. On the Aβ side, most of the therapeutic approaches to reduce the accumulation of the protein have shown very few clinical outcomes… Some researchers have even come to consider that Aβ disorders might be only a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease, and not a cause.
However, immunotherapies targeting Aβ-oligomers appear to have promising clinical results, in asymptomatic/mild stages of the disease to prevent the apparition of more symptoms, showing that the role of Aβ in the Alzheimer’s disease apparition and evolution is not fully understood, yet.
On the tau protein side, the relation between a malfunction in the tau-protein cycle and the neurologic symptoms appears quite robust, as clinical results have shown an important correlation between tau burden and patients’ symptoms. However, as tau also plays an important role in the normal functioning of the whole brain, tau-targeting approaches may be impaired by important side-effects…
For that reason, the tau-targeting most promising trials are immunotherapies focusing specifically the mutant tau-proteins, causing the disease. To go further on the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, and the treatments investigated, check those excellent reviews: