“This is the first study to show that [the compound] Cu(ATSM) can increase the abundance of P-gp clearance pumps in an Alzheimer’s model, by 24.1 percent, effectively linking the repair of the blood-brain barrier to a reduction in toxic proteins and improved cognitive function,” Dr. Pyun said.
“By improving the pumps, the brain can finally clear out the trapped waste. Over 56 days, the treatment reduced toxic amyloid-beta by 42 percent and improved spatial learning by nearly 44 percent.”
“Cu(ATSM) is a copper compound with anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties that has already progressed to clinical testing for conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS,” Professor Nicolazzo said.
CNS disease drugs (Alzheimer’s, stroke, ALS) translate from mice to humans under 10% of the time. Mouse models like the referenced primary source are poor proxies as they’re engineered for single, clean pathologies (e.g. one mutation), while human neurodegeneration is messier, multifactorial, and not fully replicated even when surface features like amyloid plaques appear.
Since it’s already in clinical trials for ALS and Parkinson’s, hopefully testing for Alzheimer’s can be done much more quickly than otherwise would be possible.
Clinical trials for als are a crapshoot. They’ll approve anything for a trial because what can it hurt
Source: dad was in the radicava trial. Can’t prove it, but he went fast. Probably faster than he would have without. They excluded him from the dataset because he was inconvenient.
It can pass phase 2 easier but not phase 3 trails.
So, the same failure rate as basically any drug, and many biologics, vaccines.
Oh, I’m pretty sure vaccines carry a lot more efficacy than 10%.
Failure to reach approval. E.g. progressing through clinical trials. Not efficacy.
A vaccine’s efficacy is not the same thing as the success rate of a drug going through trials.
Even going by the description …… if the problem with Alzheimer’s is the damage is done before you see symptoms, fixing them path to damage can only keep it from getting worse.
Hopefully we’ll eventually see, but I’m in the camp of the only likely cure being prevention. We already know that some lifestyle changes and vaccinations can lower the risk, even if too many of us can’t fix our habits, and our politico-economy prevents us from doing much about environmental risk factors
The trick is early testing to find the condition before symptoms, then perhaps a treatment like this article would be useful
I wonder what kind of side effects it has. If side effects are minimal or nonexistent, I could see it eventually becoming an OTC thing you just take like a supplement to help reduce your risk in the first place