Credit: Albert Einstein College of Medicine
April 22, 2021 (BRONX, NY) Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have designed an experimental drug that reversed key symptoms of Alzheimer s disease in mice. The drug works by reinvigorating a cellular cleaning mechanism that gets rid of unwanted proteins by digesting and recycling them. The study was published online today in the journal
Cell. Discoveries in mice don t always translate to humans, especially in Alzheimer s disease, said co-study leader Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases, professor of developmental and molecular biology, and co-director of the Institute for Aging Research at Einstein. But we were encouraged to find in our study that the drop-off in cellular cleaning that contributes to Alzheimer s in mice also occurs in people with the disease, suggesting that our drug may also work in humans. In the 1990s, Dr. Cuervo discovered