A gene known to cause a rare form of familial Parkinson's disease codes for 2 separate and opposing enzyme activities, both of which affect the degradation and accumulation of proteins such as α-synuclein, researchers report.
Worries over side effects of γ-secretase inhibitors due to their unwanted effect on Notch cleavage might ease a little with a report demonstrating that the two cleavage events may be regulated at least partly independently. Certain nicastrin mutations affect only Notch cleavage, not AβPP cleavage.
Two papers advance the drive to develop an Alzheimer's vaccine, one looking at the antibody response in some of the Elan trial participants, the other using sophisticated methods to analyze the epitope recognized by antibodies generated in response to Aβ42 immunization.
In today's PNAS early edition, researchers report that transgenic mice devoid of the protein α-synuclein are resistant to MPTP, a neurotoxin that induces Parkinson-like symptoms....
Can PET improve on the battery of tests that are already in use to diagnose Alzheimer's. A new study shows that imaging analysis decreases the number of false negatives by five percent and the number of false positives by more than 10 percent...
A mutation in mice that causes ataxia, or muscle paralysis, has been identified as an insertion of 5.2 kb of DNA in the gene for ubiquitin-specific protease 14 (Usp14)....
Less than two weeks after announcing that memantine had shown significant benefit in a clinical trial of patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease, Forest Laboratories announced that they have withdrawn their New Drug Application with the FDA...
Fluorescence imaging has become a powerful tool for measuring protein mobility and is particularly suited to probing the dynamics of protein-protein interactions in inclusion bodies....
Researchers from The Jackson Laboratory and Tufts University report that oxidative stress is linked to cell-cycle re-entry and neurodegeneration in a mouse expressing abnormally low levels of the apoptosis-inducing factor (Aif) gene...
Forest Laboratories, Inc., reported last week that patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease taking memantine and donepezil had significant improvement over patients on donepezil alone on tests of cognitive and daily functioning...
Researchers working on NSAIDs as potential treatments for AD are discussing whether a large ongoing prevention trial of two such anti-inflammatories is testing the right drugs.