Breakthrough for Alzheimer's Research

"Alzheimer’s in a dish" gel with live human brain cells could speed evaluation of treatments, cures

The science behind it is profound, but the name even its researchers use is deceptively simple: "Alzheimer’s in a dish."

More specifically, it’s a gel in which Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School researchers have succeeded in growing human brain cells in a laboratory petri dish which then can be administered Alzheimer’s genes, giving scientists a way to study the interactions of possible treatments and cures with diseased brain cells far more quickly and accurately than they could with laboratory mice.

"This will make drug screening ten times faster and literally ten times cheaper," said Dr. Rudy Tanzi, the lead researcher with the neuroscience team, which published its breakthrough in the newest edition of the prestigious science journal Nature. "The nice thing is we're doing this in a dish, in a mini-brain-like environment of gel, and we can get this to happen within two to three months. So now we can, for the first time screen, new therapies and drugs in a dish, which is much faster than doing it in a mouse, which takes over a year, and the mouse doesn't even really recapitulate the Alzheimer's pathology" – or, in other words, develop real human Alzheimer’s in the way the bowls of brain gel will.

The Cure Alzheimer’s fund helped underwrite the work done by Tanzi, Doo Yeon Kim, and colleagues. Already, it’s been used to get a clearer understanding of how brain plaques called beta amyloids cause “tangles” inside neurons that lead to brain inflammation and Alzheimer’s.

"This is a beginning, not an end," Tanzi said in an interview Monday afternoon. "This study is a beginning to a lot of hard work to now use this system and come up with new therapies and new answers."

What Tanzi’s group now wants to do is test, in these dishes, every single drug on the market, and see if any may halt the processes that lead to Alzheimer's. That means a total of 1,200 Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs now available for prescription, plus about 5,000 more that the FDA has approved as safe for further testing in humans. Testing them in laboratory dishes, rather than in mice, could speed up by years the identification of drugs and compounds worth testing in people.

"The hard work that begins now is using this system to screen as many currently available drugs and safe compounds as we can find," Tanzi said.

With videographer John J. Hammann 

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