An anti-cancer drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease?

Diseases are different — one medicineVladimir Sychev, STRF.ru
Drugs used to treat cancer can help patients with Alzheimer's disease.

This was found out by specialists of the Columbia University Medical Center; the results of their work are published in the first of the September issues of The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Alzheimer's disease is a severe neurodegenerative disease accompanied by memory loss. According to experts, by 2050 there will be at least 120 million patients with this diagnosis in the world.

Now many laboratories around the world are looking for ways, if not to cure Alzheimer's disease, then at least to alleviate the condition of patients. As it turned out, some anti-cancer drugs can help in this, oddly enough.

It's all about the molecular mechanisms of memory formation. In order to consolidate information in brain cells — neurons — certain proteins must be synthesized. The first step in the synthesis of any protein is reading information from genes, in fact, obtaining a molecular "instruction" for the production of protein molecules. In turn, the reading of genetic information (transcription) is possible if the DNA molecule packed in the cell nucleus is available for "reading". To do this, the protein structures involved in DNA packaging — the so—called histones - undergo chemical modification: an acetyl group is attached to them. This process occurs with the help of acetylase enzymes. Accordingly, the reverse process of removing acetyl groups — deacetylation — makes genes unavailable for transcription; this work is performed by other enzymes — deacetylases. In anti—cancer therapy, deacetylase inhibitors are used, their use leads to the "self-destruction" of cancer cells - apoptosis. It is obvious that inhibition of deacetylases leads to an increase in the level of synthesized proteins.

As scientists from Columbia University have shown, one of the anti-cancer drugs related to deacetylase inhibitors improves memory in experimental mice with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

"This type of drug has already been approved for the treatment of patients with certain forms of cancer," says Mauro Fa, one of the authors of the work, "so we hope that its clinical trials for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease can begin in about three to four years."

This is not the first example of how a drug of a completely different orientation can be used to treat Alzheimer's disease: almost a decade and a half ago, Russian scientists from the Institute of Physiologically Active Substances of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Chernogolovka) showed that the antihistamine drug "Dimebon" can alleviate the condition of patients with this severe neurodegenerative disease.

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15.09.2009