Rethinking Alzheimer's

[question everything]

News August 7, 2008

Rethinking Alzheimer's
By taking a new tack in fighting the disease, a tiny Singapore startup may have the jump on Big Pharma

by Catherine Arnst
Business Week

Take a Scottish scientist and a Singapore investor who met because their sons were schoolmates. Add in the accidental discovery that a 100-year-old malaria drug can repair damaged brains. The result is one of the few bright spots amid a slew of notable failures in Alzheimer's drug development.

TauRx Therapeutics, a private company based in Singapore, just reported that its drug Rember reduced mental decline by 81% over 12 months in a small phase II trial. The results have yet to be published and need to be confirmed by a larger trial. But so far, Rember has outperformed high-profile Alzheimer's drugs made by far larger companies. And it works by going after a completely different target.

(snip)

To date, most Alzheimer's researchers have pursued compounds that would clear out toxic clumps of a protein called amyloid that clog the brains of Alzheimer's victims. One amyloid drug after another has failed in trials, however. Against that background, Rember looks pretty good. Dr. Claude Wischik, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, rejects amyloid as a cause of Alzheimer's. He has long studied another protein, Tau, which masses into tangles in diseased brains. In 1988 he tried to dye these tangles in a test tube with an old malaria drug, methylene blue, to make them more visible. Instead, the tangles dissolved.

Wischik spent the next two decades figuring out why that happened, and in 2002 he formed TauRx. The $60 million in seed money was raised by the late Dr. K.M. Seng, a Singapore venture capitalist who Wischik met when their sons were school friends. Now Wischik is seeking a drug company partner.

The seeming efficacy of Rember has revived an old controversy in the Alzheimer's field: Has too much money and scientific energy been funneled into clearing amyloid at the expense of better targets? One of the few positive Alzheimer's trial results this year besides Rember was for another anti-Tau drug created by startup Allon Therapeutics of Vancouver, B.C. In a small trial of patients with mild memory impairment the drug, AL-108, improved some aspects of cognition.

(snip)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_33/b4096028640200.htm?campaign_id=yhoo

[Warpy]

1. I read about this in medicalese a few months ago

It really does look very promising. I hope he gets the green light for expanded trials. This could be the answer to a lot of prayers.

[question everything]

2. I have been bothered by all the money and time and resouces

spent on the amyloid. It was never determined whether the presence of amyloid was a cause for Alzheimer's or a result of it.

So it was good to see decent research, even without promising results, concentrating on other solutions.

[Warpy]

3. Money spent ruling something out as a primary cause

is also money well spent. If they've been barking up the wrong tree, they need to find that out, too.

My guess is that it's a combination of the two but that eliminating one will slow the progress of the disease to the point that the body will die before the mind does.

Families will be deeply grateful for that.

[kickysnana]

4. McClusky proved that the amyloids form over spirochetes in genetically predisposed people.

McClusky researched in Switzerland, Temple U and U of Vancouver.

Untreated neurosphyillis develops in 20% of those infected within 2 years. 25% of the 20% die quickly. The rest linger but die eventually(untreated). (any pre antibiotics medical book)

Most people are not getting enough treatment for Lyme Disease in this country. There is no test for Lyme outside the blood stream/urine and Lyme goes deep tissue quite soon and re-enters the blood stream sporadically. Blood tests only pick up 39% of those who have antibodies in the blood stream. (stupid conflicted CDC guidelines).

Glad something works because I am headed for Alzheimer's in the next 5 years. I have been following about 250 former members of a support group started in 1990. Those with lingering neurological symptoms lose about 20 years life span due to complications, about half to Alzheimer's, the rest to heart/lung problems, endocrine dysfunction, immune system collapse, quick cancer and other neuralgic MS, ALS etc.