Researchers from UCSD and Harvard University have developed a new stem cell model which allows them to study how Alzheimer’s disease affects the human brain. The research was conducted with the assistance of international biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
Finding new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease is incredibly important, because nearly 44 million people are affected by Alzheimer’s or a related form of dementia around the world. This number is expected to increase in coming years. The 3D Matrigel System will allow scientists to test new Alzheimer drugs directly on neurons instead of testing them on human or animal subjects.
Alzheimer’s disease creates various types of lesions in the brain including amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. The gel system will help scientists isolate the markers of these lesions and basis for Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Steven Wagner explains how the new technology will help researchers, saying: “We thought that using a Matrigel system would keep the components necessary for forming these Alzheimer’s-specific pathologies. We wanted to test these compounds and show that they could possibly prevent the formation of lesions called neuritic plaques.”
Neurobiology professor Rudolph Tanzi of Harvard University says that the research has already shown a link between amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, saying: “The human stem cell model demonstrated that disease-related changes to amyloid plaques can trigger tangles in another protein called tau.”
It is expected that the Matrigel system could make testing drugs as much as 10-times cheaper and faster than current techniques. Scientists have also discovered that certain compounds can prevent plaque formation from occurring in the first place.
Using stem cells to perform this kind of research is very useful because modeling the disease in animals has given unpredictable results in the past. This technique uses neurones derived from stem cells that are placed in the 3D Matrigel system — a gelatinous protein mixture that resembles the complex extracellular environment found in many tissues. Scientists hope to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease in the near future and save millions of lives around the world.
Source: Scientists Use Stem Cells to Model Alzheimer’s disease
{{cta(‘3fe0aac7-7562-46dc-b8b9-c706d9cfd6b1’)}}
{{cta(‘fec594e9-5433-4350-9180-2bdd371eb399’)}}