Scientists on Tuesday reported that they had reversed Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a feat that offers hope of a potential cure for the devastating form of dementia in humans.
In a paper published Tuesday in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, a team of researchers describe how, by harnessing the brain’s garbage disposal system, they managed to repair the brain and reverse the progress of the disease in the animals.
Specifically, they used nanotechnology to target and restore the brain’s “vascular gatekeeper,” the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from toxins and streamlines blood flow in and out of the brain.
Maintenance work
The new method came from studying how the buildup of “waste” proteins such as amyloid-beta (Aβ) impairs neuron function. Sometimes, clever solutions to complex problems come from going back to the basics.
Typically, the blood-brain barrier filters out unwanted substances from the brain, but in people with Alzheimer’s, the barrier gets clogged or fails to respond properly to intruders.
“We think it works like a cascade: when toxic species such as Aβ accumulate, disease progresses,” Giuseppe Battaglia, study senior author and a neuroscientist at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, said in a statement.
“But once the vasculature is able to function again,” Battaglia said, “it starts clearing Aβ and other harmful molecules, allowing the whole system to recover its balance.”
How they did it
Battaglia and his team developed nanoparticles that mimicked a protein called LRP1, a molecule typically responsible for reacting to toxins in the blood-brain barrier.
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