Promising Treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease - Neuroscience News

Professor Shai Rahimipour in the Chemistry Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has pioneered a different approach utilizing theranostics to pinpoint and treat the earliest, pre-symptomatic signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Controversy over efficacy and notable side effects such as microhemorrhages and brain swelling highlight the need for better therapy and tools for early Alzheimer’s disease detection to improve standard of care.

Rahimipour and his team have overcome these barriers by developing small abiotic and drugable cyclic peptides that have proven effective in animal models in diagnosing early pre-symptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s and treating the disease by targeting oligomers.

Much to their delight, the molecule detected for the first time early amyloid beta oligomers in the thalamus (which relays motor and sensory signals to the cerebral cortex) of pre-symptomatic mice prior to their spread to other brain parts.

Employing a semicarbazide as an aza-glycine residue with an extra hydrogen-bond donor to tune nanotube assembly and amyloid engagement, [azaGly 6]- 1 inhibited Aβ aggregation and toxicity at substoichiometric concentrations.

In an AD mouse model, brain positron emission tomography (PET) imaging using stable 64 Cu-labeled (aza)peptide tracers gave unprecedented early amyloid detection in 44-d presymptomatic animals.