Roskamp scientists make major Alzheimer's finding

MANATEE COUNTY — Scientists at the Roskamp Institute, a biomedical research nonprofit that studies diseases of the mind, isolated a key molecule that gives researchers a new drug target in the quest to cure Alzheimer's disease.

The discovery, the culmination of at least 10 years work by more than a dozen scientists, was published Oct. 20 in the online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It's scheduled for the print edition in December, according to a release.

“These findings are really significant,” University of California Irvine research professor David Cribbs says in the release. Cribbs is also associate director of the Institute for Memory Impairment and Neurological Disorders at UCI. “With all of the failures of the clinical trials of drugs for this dementia up to this point the finding of new therapeutics is wonderful.”

The focus of the finding is Roskamp researchers identified a single enzyme that propagates the three key hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease — inflammation, accumulation of amyloid protein, and modulation of the 'tau' protein. All of those are responsible for damage to the nerve cells of the brain, which leads to Alzheimer's, a progressive, irreversible neurological disorder. Alzheimer's affects 5.2 million Americans, or 1 in 9 adults over the age of 65 and is the most prevalent form of dementia in the elderly. Alzheimer's has been the subject of intensive research for more than 20 years, the release states, but there is no approved treatment that impacts the course of the disease.

“These studies suggest there is a single drug target to inhibit all the three key pathologies of Alzheimer's disease,” neurobiologist Daniel Paris, the lead researcher for the study, says in the statement. “The potential for developing a single 'multi-modal' drug treatment that will control all three of these Alzheimer's characteristics has us very excited. All of these pathologies are interrelated. In theory, by interrupting these three molecular pathways, we can develop more effective drugs to stop the disease.”

Roskamp scientists will next seek to test their hypothesis, either by developing new drugs in-house or partnering with academic and commercial groups.