A preventive treatment for dementia has shown great promise in tests in mice. The first clinical trials could soon be scheduled.
In France, Alzheimer's – the most common form of dementia – affects three million people directly or indirectly and nearly 50 million people in the world. The disease remains largely misunderstood. That is why it is so difficult to fight and unfortunately still incurable.
Two cerebral phenomena are however well described. The accumulation in the brain of beta-amyloid peptides Firstly. And the transformation of Tau proteins into abnormally phosphorylated and aggregated forms. Together, these two conditions progressively promote neuronal degeneration in patients.
Many approaches have been carried out in recent years with the aim of combating these aggregations of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain. Unfortunately, all of them ended in failure. As a result, the current consensus suggests that it is now better to turn to preventive measures . In other words, to treat dementia, the idea would be to prevent these toxic proteins from accumulating in the first place .
Pre-clinical evidence also suggests that these two abnormally aggregated proteins interact synergistically to cause downstream neurodegeneration. They must therefore be considered together, not separately.
In this direction, progress is currently being made by researchers from the Institute for Molecular Medicine (USA) and Flinders University (Australia). In a study published in the journal Alzheimer’s Research &Therapy , they explain that they have developed a treatment breaking down into two vaccines . The first aims to generate antibodies preventing the aggregation of amyloid proteins, and the other of tau proteins.
"What we're doing with these vaccines is getting the immune system to make antibodies that can recognize these abnormal clumps of protein and break them down “, explain the researchers.
These two vaccines – dubbed AV-1959R and AV-1980R – were recently tested in mice developed to show signs of dementia. This work revealed that the approach effectively prevented aggregations of these two proteins in the first place , but not only ! It had also made it possible to significantly reduce those already formed .
In other words, these two vaccines would have the potential to act both preventively and curative. At least that's what this mouse study suggests. The researchers now say they are ready for the first clinical trials. These could be programmed in the next two years .
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