Joined: 12/6/2011
Posts: 3326
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From Alzheimer's Daily News:
(Source: Penn News) - Penn Medicine research presented at the 2012 Alzheimer's Association International Conference shows that an anti-tau treatment called epithilone D (EpoD) was effective in preventing and intervening the progress of Alzheimer's disease in animal models, improving neuron function and cognition, as well as decreasing tau pathology.
By targeting tau, the drug aims to stabilize microtubules, which help support and transport of essential nutrients and information between cells. When tau malfunctions, microtubules break and tau accumulates into tangles.
"This drug effectively hits a tau target by correcting tau loss of function, thereby stabilizing microtubules and offsetting the loss of tau due to its formation into neurofibrillary tangles in animal models, which suggests that this could be an important option to mediate tau function in Alzheimer's and other tau-based neurodegenerative diseases," said Dr. John Trojanowski, professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "In addition to drugs targeting amyloid, which may not work in advanced Alzheimer's disease, our hope is that this and other anti-tau drugs can be tested in people with Alzheimer's disease to determine whether stabilizing microtubules damaged by malfunctioning tau protein may improve clinical and pathological outcomes."
Phase I clinical trials to test the microtubule stabilizing-drug in mild Alzheimer's cases are in the planning stages.
Go to full story: http://www.uphs.upenn.edu
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