Not a stroke, so Alzheimer's
Scientists from the USA accidentally discovered a cure for Alzheimer's disease
American biologists accidentally found a very promising cure for Alzheimer's disease, experimenting with a new drug to combat the effects of strokes. The results of their experiments on mice were presented in the journal JEM (Lazic et al., 3K3A-activated protein C blocks amyloidogenic BACE1 pathway and improves functional outcome in mice).
"This drug has neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory properties, which forced us to test how it will affect the brains of mice suffering from Alzheimer's disease. We have shown that it can be used as a very effective means to destroy beta-amyloid in the early stages of its development," said Borislav Zlokovich from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USA).
It is believed that Alzheimer's disease is caused by the accumulation of a pathogenic substance inside neurons, the beta-amyloid protein. It is formed from the "scraps" of the APP protein, which is involved in the processes of repairing damaged neurons and forming connections between them. Violations in the processing of molecules of this protein lead to the appearance of beta-amyloid plaques and the destruction of nerve cells.
In recent years, biologists have made significant progress in understanding what causes this disease and what it is. For example, scientists have recently found out that Alzheimer's disease can be contagious, discovered that beta-amyloid plaques can be an important part of the innate immune system, and found several promising methods of its treatment.
Zlokovich and his colleagues found out how to protect the brain from the accumulation of such protein tangles, paying attention to the unusual properties of the APC enzyme, which protects blood vessels from the formation of "unnecessary" blood clots in them and suppressing inflammation.
Recently, scientists have discovered that this substance has other useful properties – for example, it protects cells from death when there is a lack of oxygen and nutrients. This led many doctors to assume that it can be used to protect organs from ischemia.
The authors of the article conducted experiments with one of the synthetic versions of this protein, 3K3A-APC, which is not able to dissolve blood clots and cause the most dangerous bleeding in the brain. Initially, it was created to combat strokes, but the authors of the article decided to test how it would affect the lives of mice predisposed to the development of Alzheimer's disease.
As these experiments have shown, just four months of taking small doses of this protein was enough to reduce the number of amyloid plaques by about half, if they are already present in the brain, and prevent their appearance in principle, if they have not yet arisen.
Having received such amazing results, Zlokovich and his colleagues became interested in how exactly this drug caused the body of mice to stop "assembling" new beta-amyloid particles. To do this, they compared which genes associated with the development of Alzheimer's disease changed their work in the body of cured rodents.
Unexpectedly, it turned out that this happened because their drug interfered with the reading of the BACE1 gene. He is responsible for assembling a kind of molecular "scissors" that cut the strands of the APP protein and form the "building blocks" of beta-amyloid, ab42 molecules, from which "full-fledged" plaques are formed.
Accordingly, blocking BACE1 stopped this "assembly line" and protected the mice from all the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. In general, the behavior of such rodents, as scientists note, did not differ in any way from healthy mice – they also quickly memorized new information and recalled the position of dangerous areas in their cells.
Interestingly, 3K3A-APC has already passed the first two phases of clinical trials on volunteers who have suffered stroke and ischemia. Therefore, scientists hope that he will very soon begin to undergo similar tests with the participation of people who have Alzheimer's disease was found recently.
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