Taking out the trash: the journey of an extraordinary, experimental Alzheimer’s drug

The importance of a cell-clearing mechanism in Alzheimer’s has been exposed and utilized to design an experimental therapeutic for the disease.   A team of researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (NY, USA) has determined the significance of a mechanism that clears defunct and excess proteins in Alzheimer’s disease and used it as the basis to develop a novel drug. When tested in a mouse model, the drug succeeded in improving clearance and reversing symptoms.  The importance of a chaperone  The clearing process, known as chaperone-mediated autophagy, was discovered and has been rigorously studied by the study’s co-lead author Ana Maria...