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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @05:14PM (7 children)
Why is this always presented as the alternative? The alternative isn't nothing, it is the cholinergic hypothesis, which has already resulted in useful drugs. For no apparent reason this was replaced by the amyloid hypothesis, which has resulted in nothing.
There may be an even better idea than the cholinergic hypothesis out there too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @10:57PM (6 children)
That is not the only alternative either, although it is the oldest. The reason that it was replaced is because cholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase inhibitors only improve the symptoms of the disease while the signs, especially those in the brain structure, continue to worsen. In addition, they don't always decrease the symptoms of AD despite all of them increasing the levels of the neurotransmitter. Both of those suggest that you are looking at an effect of the disease, rather than a cause.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @12:34AM (5 children)
Yes, but it was replaced with a new theory that does not work at all... Shouldnt there be some sort of evidential threshold a new theory must surpass before it becomes dogma?
Interesting idea -> dogma is not science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @02:14AM (4 children)
There are other hypotheses out there. I was just pointing out that the one you offered has been mostly ruled out, and how that is similar to how the amyloid hypothesis is showing problems with its theoretical causal models. But at the time, it made sense given what they were seeing in the brain and the previously niche prion diseases coming to wider attention. Part of the problem, which some research is bearing out, may be that "Alzheimer's Disease" is actually multiple diseases with similar clinical features. Just as NFTs and enlarged ventricles are known to be involved with other diseases, the symptoms and signs of AD might be a syndrome indicative of multiple diseases.
For example, a large chunk of AD is hereditary through multiple genes with different proposed links (see DNS-APP studies and EOAD). There is also the idea that it is some sort of inflammatory process of the brain, either through injury or infection. It could be a failure of the BBB or caused by lead exposure or autoimmune based or retrogenesis or even more. Or, as mentioned, all of the above.
The real problem is how people donate money. The big donors all do it to particular doctors, research hospitals, or other big donors. Of course they use it to do the research they've been doing or what looks most fruitful at the time. It is the smaller grant or University research that will explore alternate ideas because they aren't flush with cash to compete along the same lines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:41AM (3 children)
It made sense to investigate it, not elevate it to dogma. This was done based on nothing.
Ah, the "it is so complicated we need to call it multiple diseases canard" first invented by the failed war on cancer people. Cancer is one disease characterized by cells undergoing inappropriate division, chromosomal instability, high iron content, and oxidative stress. Instead of targeting those things they have been targeting specific genes that the cell lines will simply mutate to resistance. That is why they failed.
When you study something for decades spending hundreds of billions of dollars and in the end things seem more complicated than you started with, something is seriously wrong with what you are doing.
The goal of science is to discover general rules/laws by which a phenomenon operates. Perhaps biomed researchers should use research methods appropriate to that goal instead of checking whether two groups are *different* over and over and then they wont have to come up with excuses like this.
https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133-2 [cell.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:49AM
Looks like cancer research stagnated about 15 years before amyloid research did.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835886/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:42PM (1 child)
Like medicine or anything else in general? Just look at Newton's ideas vs Einstein's general relativity. They explain the same phenomenon, but the latter is more complicated than the former. Or medicine, first it was spirits, then we discovered the germ theory of disease, then we discovered different kinds of germs, then we discovered that not all germs cause disease the same way, and we learned that the same germ can cause multiple diseases. That stuffy nose you have? Back in the day, you either had an evil spirit or were outside in the cold too long, now we know that it could be any number of viral, fungal, or bacterial infections, allergies, inflammatory disorders, anatomical problems, and more. But I guess that can't be true because science is supposed to be simple and there should only be one disease there.
Same with cancer. It is a group of diseases because there are many different genetic changes that cause cells to become cancerous. In addition, not all changes will cause cancers in all types of cells. The treatments also have to differ depending on the type of cancerous cells because they don't all react the same way to the same treatments. But if you want a simple rule, without the "right combination" genes, you don't get cancer, a point driven home by comparative oncology. Any wonder why they focus on the underlying genetic factors, especially in a preventative role in addition to apoptosis and immunotherapy?
And medical and biomedical researchers use all the testing they have. There is in vitro testing, in vivo animal models, and even human experimentation. The problem is that, unlike many fields of research, medical research is ethically limited. There is limited ability to expose people to treatments, pathogens, or environments, to chop people up or biopsy their tissues, and to do many things even with their consent. Heck, you even have to get permission from an ethics board to ask them questions that are personally identifiable or beyond symptom presentation.
I understand the desire to make things simple, but sometimes things are complex. The previously mentioned sinusitis, weak interaction requiring 3 types of bosons, supply and demand depends on expectation, weather, oxygen theory of combustion, wave-particle duality? All of that is too complicated compared to the alternatives, must be wrong. Lets just undo modern science in the search of your simplicity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @11:15PM
Sorry, you are totally naive. Show me one mainstream medical "theory" that even tries to make a precise prediction like Newton and Einstein. Most of them don't even know how to do calculus or program their ideas into a computational model. It is systematic incompetence and it shows. There has been no real progress in cancer, dementia, strokes, TBI, etc for decades. And the little progress we have seen came from "crackpots" like Kary Mullis and Raymond Damadian.