RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-27 Research News While genome-wide association studies tie variants to disease risk, they don’t explain how those variants influence gene expression or pathology. In the March 21 Nature Genetics, scientists led by Vilas Menon and Philip De Jager at New York’
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-26 Research News The space between the arachnoid and pia meningeal layers encasing the brain is a landscape of connective tissue, blood vessels, and cerebrospinal fluid. Scientists debate how that fluid moves within the space and through brain tissue. Now, a
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2024-03-23 Conference Coverage At this year’s AD/PD meeting, held March 5-9 in Lisbon, Portugal, no splashy Phase 3, or even Phase 2, data on tau-targeted therapies wowed attendees. Still, Phase 1 and preclinical data showcased a variety of therapeutic approaches th
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2024-03-22 Conference Coverage Old drugs die hard. Despite a string of negative Phase 3 trials, HMTM, a derivative of the malaria drug methylene blue, resurfaced again at AD/PD 2024, held March 5-9 in Lisbon, Portugal. TauRx CEO Claude Wischik reported results from
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-21 Research News The macrophage and microglial receptor TREM1 whips up inflammation. In its tizzy, the receptor also perturbs myeloid cell metabolism and hastens cognitive decline in older wild-type mice and in two models of amyloidosis, according to scienti
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-20 Research News Brain lesions beset with smoldering inflammation, and myeloid cells around their edges, define multiple sclerosis. This might be due, in part, to the flipping of electron flow within microglia, propose Luca Peruzzotti-Jametti, Stefano Pluchi
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2024-03-15 Conference Coverage A record 4,700 people from 70 countries attended the 18th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, held March 5 to 9 in Lisbon, Portugal. Those who attended this hybrid meeting in person sometimes packed rooms
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-13 Research News Last year, scientists led by Tony Wyss-Coray, Stanford University, reported that Aβ induced formation of lipid droplets within human microglia, and attributed this to an uptick in a triglyceride synthesis enzyme. APOE4 aggravated lipid dropl
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-12 Research News Almost half of a person's DNA consists of retrotransposons, remnants of ancient viral infections that have jumped around the human genome. Retrotransposons are typically kept under wraps by epigenetics, but tau can unleash those restrai
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-08 Research News Enticing a reluctant FDA Advisory Committee to greenlight its drug based solely on Phase 2, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals promised, sort of, that if its ongoing Phase 3 trial returned negative results, it would voluntarily withdraw the drug. Those
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-07 Research News Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia are heterogeneous diseases that are difficult to fully model in mice. One of the more common forms is caused by hexanucleotide repeat expansion in the gene C9ORF72, which prompts both
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-05 Research News During sleep, the brain cleans itself, turning up the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the gray matter parenchyma to wash away waste. What powers this flow? In the February 28 Nature online, researchers led by Jonathan Kipnis at Washingto
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-05 Research News The brain's metabolism starts to wane decades before Alzheimer's symptoms. Why the energy deficit? Scientists led by Andrés Norambuena and George Bloom at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, blame failure of a specific typ
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-01 Research News While numerous fluid markers flag brain Aβ pathology in Alzheimer’s disease, markers of neurofibrillary tangles are few and far between. Now, scientists led by Oskar Hansson at Lund University in Sweden and Juan Lantero-Rodriguez of the Univ
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-29 Research News How alike are familial and sporadic Alzheimer’s? It depends. Broadly speaking, in terms of their presymptomatic biomarker changes, the two resemble each other closely (see Feb 2024 news). In terms of what goes on inside affected cells, thing