Researchers clear up Alzheimer's plaques in mice

I think we tend to ignore research when we see the word mice. But, this is where medical research often starts. I find this research interesting and promising. If you would like to read more follow the link in the clip.

Blocking a common immune system response cleared up plaques associated with Alzheimer’s Disease and enabled treated mice to recover some lost memory, Yale University researchers report Friday in the journal Nature Medicine.

clipped from www.physorg.com Researchers hope the new approach may one day overcome one of the biggest obstacles to development of new dementia medications – the difficulty in finding drugs that can safely cross the blood-brain barrier. The results of the research surprised the scientists working in the lab of Richard Flavell, senior author of the paper, chairman of the Department of Immunobiology at Yale and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Flavell’s team originally thought that blocking the immune system molecule TGF-â(or transforming growth factor), might actually increase the buildup of amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s Disease the team found that as much as 90 percent of the plaques were eliminated from the brains of mice genetically engineered to block TGF-â in the peripheral immune cells. It was like a vacuum cleaner had removed the plaques," Flavell said.