A local team of researchers has announced a promising breakthrough in understanding the onset of of Alzheimer's disease.
The team has learned of a genetic variant that can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by four years, leading to possible new treatments.
Dr. Judes Poirier of the Douglas Mental Health Institute lead a team that demonstrated that HMG CoA, a gene known to control cholesterol production, can also interfere with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, delaying it by up to 48 months.
It is hoped that the discovery will eventually lead to pharmaceutical treatments to delay the onset of the disease.
"These latest genetic results from Dr. Poirier’s team are an important step forward in the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease neurobiology and also the use of genetics to identify an interesting new molecular target that is amenable to therapeutic development,” Brigitte Kieffer, a research director at the Douglas, wrote in a press release issued Tuesday in Montreal.
Poirier presented the team’s findings as the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Copenhagen.
It gives us a target for developing new medications,” Poirier said later in an interview with Mutsumi Takahashi on July 22 (watch interview above).
“We tried a more than 110 new, experimental drugs in Alzheimer’s experiments. They all failed miserably. It’s probably time for us to look very differently at the problem. The protective genes have never been looked at in that way in the past.”
