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posted by janrinok on Monday January 06 2020, @08:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the hope dept.

Novel dementia vaccine on track for human trials within two years:

A newly published study has described the successful results in mice of a novel vaccine designed to prevent neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease. The researchers suggest this "dementia vaccine" is now ready for human trials, and if successful could become the "breakthrough of the next decade."

The new study, led by the Institute for Molecular Medicine and University of California, Irvine, describes the effect of a vaccine designed to generate antibodies that both prevent, and remove, the aggregation of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain. The accumulation of these two proteins is thought to be the primary pathological cause of neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease.

The research revealed the vaccine led to significant decreases in both tau and amyloid accumulation in the brains of bigenic mice engineered to exhibit aggregations of these toxic proteins. Many prior failed Alzheimer's treatments over the past few years have focused individually on either amyloid or tau protein reductions, but growing evidence suggests a synergistic relationship between the two toxic proteins may be driving neurodegeneration. Hence the hypothesis a combination therapy may be the most effective way to prevent this kind of dementia.

This new treatment combines two vaccines, dubbed AV-1959R and AV-1980R, which are designed to respectively target amyloid and tau protein aggregations. The vaccine is formulated in a novel adjuvant called Advax, developed by a team of Australian researchers to enhance vaccine immunogenicity.

Advax has been developed by Nikolai Petrovsky, a scientist from Australia's Flinders University who told ABC News Australia the new formulation offers the potential to act as both a preventative vaccine against the development of neurodegeneration, and a curative treatment in subjects already suffering from a build-up of these toxic proteins.

[...] The new research was published in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:17PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:17PM (#940204)

    If you want to give them hope, give them vitamin c which is the least toxic substance known to man (less toxic than water) and the best antioxidant in the universe and known to be depleted in alzhiemers patients.

    In fact, if hospitals would end their bizarre policy of not routinely checking vitamin c levels they will find almost everyone who is sick have lower levels and need much more vitamin c than healthy people to get them back to normal (because it gets consumed faster in the diseased tissue).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:27PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:27PM (#940210)

    Your vitamin C theories were debunked decades ago.

    Plus you’ve been dead for a quarter century. Get off the internet already!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:35PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:35PM (#940216)

      The only debunkings are for giving people extremely low infrequent doses. If your body needs 10 grams every two hours but you give 100 mg per day, why would you expect anything to happen?

      It's like debunking the idea water cures thirst because people are still thirsty after taking one sip.

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday January 06 2020, @04:12PM (4 children)

        by RS3 (6367) on Monday January 06 2020, @04:12PM (#940225)

        Perhaps Vit. C only works well in some people, for some diseases?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:28PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:28PM (#940236)

          Its primary function is not as a vitamin, it is as an antioxidant. It will be helpful anytime too much inflammation is a problem (which is almost every disease). In most cases it seems to reduce symptoms, sometimes to zero, instead of curing anything.

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:39PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:39PM (#940245)

          Also, the dose required is individualized and seems to depends on your current state of health. This has been independently noticed twice that I know of. Once by Russel Jaffe:

          https://i.ibb.co/B2cCcfw/jaffe1.png [i.ibb.co]
          https://i.ibb.co/3MxX81T/jaffe2.png [i.ibb.co]

          And once by Robert Cathcart:
          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7321921 [nih.gov]

          So a clinical trial that gives everyone the same dose, or dose according to weight/etc is not going to work. The dose must depend on the redox state of your body.

          • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday January 06 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)

            by RS3 (6367) on Monday January 06 2020, @05:52PM (#940278)

            Very interesting, thank you. I didn't realize Vit. C helps with inflammation.

            So how to treat someone who is quite ill, already has very loose stool, scurvy and other vit. C deficiency symptoms? Maybe IV vit. C?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @06:16PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @06:16PM (#940286)

              So how to treat someone who is quite ill, already has very loose stool, scurvy and other vit. C deficiency symptoms? Maybe IV vit. C?

              The IV vitamin c is going to be more expensive just due to the IV. First just get sodium ascorbate or ascorbic acid powder and see how much your body will absorb and how you feel. Just look up ascorbate cleanse, titrating to bowel tolerance, etc.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:44PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @03:44PM (#940220)

      Imagine there is a forest fire but you have no way of dumping water on any one part of the forest, you can only dump water over the entire forest. Then you are going to need to use way more water to get the required amount to the actual fire. Most of it will appear to be wasted, but it was necessary to stop the fire.

      Fire = oxidative stress
      Water = vitamin c

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @04:18PM (#940228)

        So we should use fire to burn out the tau and amyloid beta? This is so confusing...