Drug to prevent Alzheimer's

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Neuroscience News

Source: University of Kentucky.

Researchers have known for decades that the hallmark plaques and tangles in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s develop long before people experience memory loss. Ai-Ling Lin, an assistant professor at Sanders-Brown, hopes to demonstrate that low doses of Rapamycin, a drug commonly used as an immunosuppressant for organ transplant recipients, can restore brain function before the disease changes in the brain affect a person’s memory.

“We know that Rapamycin signals blood vessels to dilate, which increases cerebral blood flow and helps regulate the physical and chemical processes that support effective cell function – also known as metabolic homeostasis,” Lin said. “We hope our research will demonstrate that Rapamycin prompts tangible benefit by preventing the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Her study is unique in that it will also assess whether a relatively new imaging concept called multimodal MRI (mMRI) is effective in measuring the efficacy of other potential treatments. mMRI uses traditional MRI plus another form of imaging (CT scan or PET scan, for example) to provide complementary information.

“We have two eyes for a reason. You can function with just one, but eyesight is improved when both eyes work well,” Lin explained. “mMRI follows the same concept: multiple layers of data increase accuracy.”

“If I can demonstrate that mMRI is an effective surrogate for the types of testing we currently have at our disposal, we have a new avenue to explore potential treatments on a faster and more straightforward track.”

Lin will be studying the drug in mice with the APOE4 gene, which is associated with an increased risk of AD. She will validate mMRI results with biological and behavioral tests to confirm mMRI’s accuracy.

Lin will be studying the drug in mice with the APOE4 gene, which is associated with an increased risk of AD. She will validate mMRI results with biological and behavioral tests to confirm mMRI’s accuracy. NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.

Her work will be funded by a five-year, $2.88 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

It will be a while before Rapamycin as a therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s will be ready for human clinical trials, but the concept of mMRI as a surrogate for other testing methods has potential for speedy adoption, as the mMRI methods are readily available to be used in humans. “Being able to test a drug and also a means of assessing other drugs in the future is truly exciting,” Lin said.

Linda Van Eldik, director of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, says that this latest grant is another important step in Sanders-Brown’s race against Alzheimer’s.

“As many as one in five people carry the Alzheimer’s gene APOE4, so the idea that a readily-available drug already demonstrated to be safe in humans might prevent what is arguably the most devastating and expensive disease in modern history is exciting,” said Van Eldik. “On top of that, Ai-Ling’s work might also speed the ability to test other treatments. It’s a win-win for science and for the people it serves.”

ABOUT THIS NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLE

Source: Laura Dawahare – University of Kentucky
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Video Source: Video credited to University of Kentucky.

Rapamycin boosts memory in those with dementia

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ANI

Scientists seeking a way to prevent the decline in memory with age have reported exciting results with a drug that has Polynesian roots.

Cognitive skills such as learning and memory diminish with age in everyone, and the drop-off is steepest in Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers, appointed in the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, added rapamycin to the diet of healthy mice throughout the rodents’ life span.

The study showed that Rapamycin, a bacterial product first isolated from soil on Easter Island, enhanced learning and memory in young mice and improved these faculties in old mice.

"We made the young ones learn, and remember what they learned, better than what is normal," Veronica Galvan, assistant professor of physiology at the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, said.

"Among the older mice, the ones fed with a diet including rapamycin actually showed an improvement, negating the normal decline that you see in these functions with age," Galvan said.

Galvan said that the drug also lowered anxiety and depressive-like behaviour in the mice.

Anxiety and depression are factors that impair human cognitive performance.

Lead author Jonathan Halloran conducted scientifically reliable tests to accurately measure these cognitive components in the rodents.

Mice are burrowers that prefer tunnels with walls. To observe their behaviour, Halloran used an elevated maze of tunnels that led to a catwalk.

Mice with less anxiety were more curious to explore the catwalk.

"We observed that the mice fed with a diet containing rapamycin spent significantly more time out in the open arms of the catwalk than the animals fed with a regular diet," Halloran said.

The second test measured depressive-like behavior in the rodents.

Mice do not like to be held by their tails, which is the way they are moved from cage to cage. Inevitably they struggle to find a way out.

"So we can measure how much and how often they struggle as a measure of the motivation they have to get out of an uncomfortable situation," Galvan said.

Some mice barely struggle to get free, but if an antidepressant is administered they struggle a lot more.

This behavior is very sensitive to the action of antidepressants and is a reliable measure of whether a drug is acting like an antidepressant, Galvan said.

"We found rapamycin acts like an antidepressant – it increases the time the mice are trying to get out of the situation," Galvan said.

"They don’t give up; they struggle more," she said.

The reductions of anxiety and depressive-like behaviour in rapamycin-treated mice held true for all ages tested, from 4 months of age to 12 months old to 25 months old.

The researchers measured levels of three "happy, feel-good" neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

All were significantly augmented in the midbrains of mice treated with rapamycin.

The study has been published online in the journal Neuroscience. (ANI)

Drug may prevent Alzheimer's, slow aging

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UPI

A drug already approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to prevent organ rejection may help prevent Alzheimer's disease, researchers said.

Several weeks after researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio said the drug rapamycin helped mice engineered to develop Alzheimer's to retain memory, the same researchers said the drug helped an entirely different mouse model engineered to have early Alzheimer's disease to remember how to swim a maze.

"Rapamycin treatment lowered levels of amyloid-beta-42, a major toxic species of molecules in Alzheimer's disease," Veronica Galvan, an assistant professor from the Barshop Institute and the department of physiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center, said in a statement.

"These molecules, which stick to each other, are suspected to play a key role in the early memory failure of Alzheimer's."

The drug is produced by a bacterial product isolated from soil of Easter Island and last year the same researchers and colleagues found rapamycin was shown to extend life in mice.

The current findings are published in the journal PLoS ONE

Want to Live Forever? Antibiotic May Prevent Age-Related Disease in People

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Attorneyatlaw.com

Ever since Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon set out for the New World to find the mythological Fountain of Youth, man has yearned to unlock the mysteries to staying forever young.


Now, 500 years after de Leon’s failed mission (he died in July 1521), medical researchers say an antibiotic pill designed to prevent organ transplant rejection has been shown to help laboratory mice live longer.

The drug, marketed under the brand name Rapamune but known generically as rapamycin or siroliumus, may also someday serve another purpose: Helping extend the lives of people battling age-related disease such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, heart disease, and other disorders, researchers said.

“Rapamycin may extend lifespan by postponing death from cancer, by retarding mechanisms of aging, or both,” David Harrison of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature, according to a Reuters news report.


Lab Rats Live Longer
In laboratory testing, adult female mice given Rapamycin lived 14 percent longer, while male mice given the drug lived nine percent longer lives, the researchers said.

However, people shouldn’t start taking Rapamycin pills daily in an effort to live longer lives, the research team cautioned. For one thing, mice in the experiment were not exposed to any infection, which could have significantly affected the study results. Also, mice do not tend to biologically age the same way as people and tend to live much shorter lives than humans.

Researchers across the United States gave.......read all about Antibiotic that prevents age related disease