Amid many years of research aimed at understanding the progression of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease, no cure or treatment exists.
In the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, researchers associated with Carnegie Mellon University determined through their new data that past efforts to establish an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s has been set up for failure because of misguidedness.
“Based on our findings, Alzheimer’s requires a similar approach to HIV treatment, where you have a cocktail of drugs used to address different elements of the disease,” said one author of the study.
“Together, these drugs work toward the larger goal; treating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in a particular patient.”
According to author Liqing Song and colleagues: “Our study shows that monomeric tau is rapidly endocytosed by multiple CNS-relevant cell lines, and the fastest tau endocytosis rate was observed in glial cells among all the cell types tested.”
“This study demonstrates the important role of both HSPGs and LRP1 in regulating cellular immune responses to tau protein monomers, providing a novel target for alleviating the neuroinflammatory environment before the formation of neurofibrillary tangles.”