No effective treatment yet, this is the heavy observation that doctors make about Alzheimer’s disease. What if the path was not in drugs, but in gene therapy? Researchers from Imperial College of London in the United Kingdom have shown proof of concept of the effectiveness of this technique in the early management of the disease.
The study published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences focuses on a modified virus, the lentivirus. This carries the PGC-1 Alpha gene and delivers it to cells in two areas of the brain: the hippocampus and the cortex. These areas are the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, with the appearance of so-called “amyloid” plaques.
Less cell damage, more memory
This device has been tested in mice at an early stage of the disease and the results are encouraging. At four months, the treated rodents show very few amyloid plaques compared to the untreated guinea pigs. They also pass memory tests with the same efficiency as healthy mice. No cell loss in the hippocampus area. Furthermore, these treated mice show a reduction in the number of glial cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, these cells can release inflammatory toxicants that lead to further cell damage.
The next challenge is to translate these early promising results in mice into a treatment for humans. Gene therapy could then become the first real effective treatment for this disease, which affects approximately 800,000 people in France.
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