AD: Amyloid inhibitors dead?
>>HealthDay.com repots a once-promising pathway for research into preventing and treating Alzheimer's disease may have been derailed by a surprise chemical finding, researchers report. Scientists in laboratories around the world have been investigating drug candidates called amyloid inhibitors, which many experts believed could keep proteins such as amyloid-beta from sticking together in brain tissue... but the new study, published Jan. 27 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, may sound an unexpected death knell for amyloid inhibitor research. In the study, a team of chemists at the University of California, San Francisco, found that these candidate drugs form large, unwieldy clumps themselves, rendering them useless as targeted therapy against amyloid in the brain. High-tech research in the lab is revealing that typical amyloid inhibitors "seem to act not in the way people expect them to and want them to," explained study senior author Brian Shoichet, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. Once these drugs aggregate into clumps, "they no longer have the right pharmacology, they won't cross the [brain's] membrane barriers, and they inhibit everything -- any protein will bind with them," he said. <<
The full text of the brief communication was posted by jellybean of IHub. It's a bit garbled, but readable.
siliconinvestor.com
Cheers, Tuck |
