New Strategy to Find Alzheimer's Drugs? Looking for A-Beta Breakers

Researchers believe there may be a new strategy to finding beneficial drugs in the fight against Alzheimer's disease. It may be the accumulation of A-beta that causes the known plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's (VIB/KU Leuven), who were the first to unravel the function of APPL-the fruit-fly version of APP-in the brain of healthy fruit flies.

"We have discovered that APPL ensures that brain cells form a good network," Alessia Soldano said, according to a press release. "We now have to ask ourselves the question whether this function of APPL is also relevant to Alzheimer's disease."

"Since we show that APP and APPL show similar activities in cultured cells, we suspect that APP in the human brain functions in the same manner as APPL in the brain of fruit flies," Bassem Hassan. "Hopefully we can use this to ask and eventually answer the question whether A-beta or APP itself is the better target for new drugs."

As the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease tends to be very recognizable due to so-called plaques, or the accumulation of proteins that are primarily made up of Amyloid beta (A-beta), a small structure that splits off from the Amyloid Precursor Protein, researchers have long-hoped that a drug that could break down the A-beta would be a helpful strategy in combating the disease.