Researchers Find Genetic Cause For Alzheimer's, Possible Method To Reverse It (upi.com) 113
schwit1 quotes UPI: Scientists at an independent biomedical research institution have reported a monumental breakthrough: The cause of the primary genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, and a possible cure for the disease. Researchers at Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco identified the primary genetic risk factor for the disease, a gene called apoE4... Their findings were published this week in the journal Nature Medicine... By treating human apoE4 neurons with a structure corrector, it eliminated the signs of Alzheimer's disease, restored normal function to the cells and improved cell survival.
The study's senior investigator says he's already working with a San Francisco pharmaceutical startup to develop the approach and move towards clinical trials, adding that "we are working to accelerate the timeline as much as possible."
The study's senior investigator says he's already working with a San Francisco pharmaceutical startup to develop the approach and move towards clinical trials, adding that "we are working to accelerate the timeline as much as possible."
Re:old news (Score:5, Insightful)
Alzheimer's is a big deal, so if this is correct we'll see a lot more attention on it.
Re:old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: old news (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Alzheimers can impact people at any age, it just so happens to happen more often later in life - like cancer.
More interestingly, there is some recent debate that alzheimers might be a 3rd form of diabetes.
Re: old news (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
It still matters not one bit. Unless the main cause of death becomes accidents with near complete and instant fatality, eventually a person gets sick and needs expensive medical care. Instead of big pharma selling you meds for Alzheimers, they sell you meds for something else.
And? What's wrong with spending money to improve your condition or make life more comfortable/fun?
Re: (Score:2)
Philistine.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"Pharma" has no interest in selling old people anything. Old people die and cease to be a revenue stream so screw them. Pharma wants young and middle aged people to sell wanky placebos to for the rest of their lives. Expensive medications which reduce death over 20 years by 0.5% and form the majority of the revenue stream of "Pharma".
Re: (Score:1)
Are you going after these monsters who grow and sell food or what exactly?
Or are you just openly a misanthrope?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Very strange abstact.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, Google Scholar search on this reveals only old articles, latest I have seen was 2014.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: old news (Score:5, Insightful)
alvinrod shrugged dismissively:
It hardly matters. Old people will eventually spend all of that money on some other medical condition. Unless you have a cure for old age in general, people will still have to face that after decades, their bodies are getting worn down. That means spending more and more money to keep it afloat or just accepting death.
"It hardly matters" to you - for the moment.
Wait until someone you care about develops Alzheimer's (this, of course, assumes you care about anyone other than yourself), and you have to deal with their progressive mental deterioration on a personal level. I can tell you from my personal experience that watching my mother steadily turn into a frightened, confused, paranoid sketch of herself, conversing with whom eventually became little more than an exercise in listening to a skipping record - constantly getting lost before she reached the end of a sentence, repeating the same "news" several dozen times in a half-hour phone call - was profoundly heart-rending.
To focus exclusively on the financial cost of the disease (and you are completely off-base even there, since Alzheimer's can require up to a decade or so of residential, supervised care before it becomes fatal in and of itself) and completely ignore the human one is profoundly callous, at best.
I'm not going to say, "I hope it happens to someone you love," because I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on anyone. But I surely am tempted ...
Re: (Score:3)
Wait until someone you care about develops Alzheimer's (this, of course, assumes you care about anyone other than yourself), and you have to deal with their progressive mental deterioration on a personal level.
You're dealing with the politicized misanthropy movement here. They hate it when a disease is cured because it means either more young people having "too many" children, or more useless old people who should all be gassed for the benefit of Mother Gaia.
Re: (Score:3)
I say that it doesn't particularly matter because in the end there's going to be something that comes for you whether it's Alzheim
Re: old news (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not disagreeing with you, what you describe is certainly the most common outcome. But some people are different. My mother's ability to transfer short-term memories to long-term memory went away; the result was that she could tell you about things that happened a few minutes ago, or things that happened fifty years ago, but lost the ability to tell you what happened an hour or a day or a year ago. Believe it or not, there was actually an upside to that. My sister would take mom out to a coffee shop,
Re: (Score:2)
>Old people will eventually spend all of that money on some other medical condition
Some of them. Some of them will just let it go and pass that money to the next generation.
I wonder how do I prevent robbers in scrubs from robbing my offspring dry using my senile condition.
Re: (Score:2)
"people will still have to face that after decades, their bodies are getting worn down" Speak for yourself, you young whipper-snapper. I'm approaching the start of my 8th decade (I'm nearly 68), and I intend to keep going for awhile.
Of course my body may disagree...
Re:old news (Score:5, Informative)
I've lost two close family members to Alzheimers. It's one of the cruelest diseases I've ever seen. Yes, we want a damn cure.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
1. Not much of the spending on Alzheimers is for drugs, it's home and institutional care. Pharmas would much rather eat the whole pie, not just a slice.
2. A cure would be quicker to bring to market, because trials would show efficacy much more quickly. For conditions where treatments are on the market, a cure would be given higher priority by the FDA than treatments, so that part of the process would be faster too.
.3. Pri
Re: (Score:1)
Do we even want a cure? Alzheimers generates a lot of revenue... [slashdot.org].
This is something that's a real tragedy and it feels very wrong to joke about it, based even on the fact that some companies want to not cure things but reduce them to get continuing money. My grandmother had it, it was the worse thing to see her go slowly.
Re: (Score:2)
Do we even want a cure? Alzheimers generates a lot of revenue... [slashdot.org].
In this case, the "cure" is likely monthly doses of this particular medicine for the rest of your life. This is exactly the type of "cure" that a company wants to have.
Even in a case where you could completely cure someone, a company who sells expensive medicine for it might not have an incentive to cure it but a different company without a conflict of interest still has an incentive to develop an expensive one time cure for it.
Re:old news -- NOT! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The primary cause of a genetic risk factor is (Score:2)
Grandma.
Re: (Score:2)
The study's senior investigator says he's already working with a San Francisco pharmaceutical startup to develop the approach
from the article linked there is no way to gain any sense of how likely this 'new' information will lead to a cure
You need to pay more attention to how /. strings you along.
Yesterday the Goldman article was posted to stir up discussion about the evils of Big Pharma and how they don't want to cure diseases.
Today we get this nebulous article about how some altruistic researchers from San Francisco found a cure for Alzheimer's and are working with a Silicon Valley start-up to develop it.
If that start-up turns out to be Theranos it would be a clickbait trifecta.
Re: (Score:2)
I read an article about this on one of the mainstream aggregators early this morning (Either Yahoo or Google).
If the subject was not so serious, say about athletes foot rather than Alzheimers, I would have dismissed it after the initial skim, rather than actually spending a few minutes to read it. And on reading it, I felt like, yeah, this is a huge amount of hype being built upon a very tiny foundation.
If there is anything to it, then I am sure that there will be a more substantive article soon. This one
Re: (Score:1)
because we sure as shootin' know he'd never go back on his word.
He didn't make any promises in that tweet you linked to, therefore he didn't 'go back on his word'. Now, if you are going to be mad at a politician for doing something he/she criticized others for in the past... well, you are going to have a busy day. I guess you prefer the ones that cover it up though.
Don't be too hard on him. He's just repeating what he heard on social media. Give him credit, he's a very useful tool.
Re: (Score:2)
Because when the next elections come, the backlash is gonna be so hard that we're gonna make sure that red-state shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool filth like you NEVER get the chance to take control of this country ever again, and for generations to come.
Wow, what a winning campaign strategy. It's the cheeriness, inclusiveness and optimism in your post that really makes me want to vote for you.
Re: Quick, send some to Twitler (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this brain is too small to contain.
Discovery? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Discovery? (Score:5, Informative)
You're correct. The paper is about a cell culture model for Alzheimer's. The authors point out that lots of potential treatments seem to work on mouse models but fail miserably in humans. So they created a cell culture model using stem-cell derived human neurons. They show that neurons that express ApoE4 have various Alzheimer's-like features, and that these can be reversed by gene editing to flip the ApoE4 to another variant, or through the use of a structure-correcting drug.
The paper is really about the cell culture model, which is very important, but it's not a new drug, and it's a long way from being an actual human.
Re: (Score:2)
The paper is really about the cell culture model, which is very important, but it's not a new drug, and it's a long way from being an actual human.
Dunno about that. There are lots of people I know that are as shallow and plastic as a petri dish.
cure Alzheimers (Score:2, Funny)
apoE4 gene not the only cause of Alzheimer's (Score:4, Interesting)
It's first required to detect the apoE gene and whether there are one or two copies to provide a provisional diagnosis, I guess that's not really a problem but the article doesn't say. I would guess that when patients reach some age or perhaps at birth the genetic test would be prescribed by physicians as a matter of course. What's the normal function of the gene?
Having one copy of the apoE gene doubles and two copies multiplies by 12 the chance of contracting Alzheimer's according to the article, which implies that there are other causes of Alzheimer's and also implies that having the gene doesn't predict with any certainty that carrier will exhibit symptoms if he or she lives long enough. Never-the-less this approach appears to have great promise, probably too late to help me (I'm not yet exhibiting symptoms though despite what my detractors may allege!)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
which implies that there are other causes of Alzheimer's and also implies that having the gene doesn't predict with any certainty that carrier will exhibit symptoms if he or she lives long enough.
Also, a good fraction of Alzheimer's patients don't have APOE4 at all.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidenc (Score:1)
Can we get other qualified experts to confirm this before news sites like slashdot start publishing it as scientific breakthrough? Oh wait.
Re: (Score:2)
Can we get other qualified experts to confirm this before news sites like slashdot start publishing it as scientific breakthrough? Oh wait.
At least they didn't proclaim, "Mission Accomplished!" -- 'cause that always goes over well ... :-)
Confirmed? (Score:2)
Hopefully they didn't use Theranos to confirm.
APOE4 link has been know for over 25 years (Score:1)
For example, from freaking 1993,
Abstract
Several studies have reported an association of the apolipoprotein E allele 4 (APOE*4) to familial and sporadic late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD). Here we report on the relationship between APOE*4 and early-onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD) in a Dutch population-based study. The frequency of the APOE*4 allele was 2.3 times higher among EOAD cases compared to controls. Among patients, the allele frequency was 1.6 times higher in those with a positive family history
Don't panic! (Score:2)
I'm sure they will soon discover a much more profitable long--term treatment option instead. /cynical
Another step to immortality (Score:1)
Aging is something we could solve.
Check out the strategy here:
The Science of Curing Aging" | Talks at Google
https://youtu.be/S6ARUQ5LoUo [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:1)
Do it anyway.
Raise the voting age past where these over educated scoundrels can't wage murder against the elderly.
Planet of the Apes Here We Come (Score:1)