By RICK COUSINS Correspondent
A new scientific paper has made headlines around the world. It could be read as offering the promise of a possible vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease. Australian researchers at Flinders University, working with the U.S.-based Institute of Molecular Medicine and University of California, Irvine, have published an article describing their two-pronged treatment to eliminate two toxic proteins from the brain that appear to be the proximate cause of brain damage in Alzheimer’s. The investigators’ paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal states that they have “identified as promising, immunogenic vaccines for ongoing preclinical assessment and future human clinical trials.”
The University of Texas Medical Branch is also researching its own Alzheimer’s vaccine, though one with a somewhat different approach. Giulio Taglialatela, a professor of neurology at the medical branch, is part of that work. He said that though the Australian work was both important and promising, it was also a very long way from anything like a cure for this dreaded disease, though some media coverage of the work may have suggested otherwise.
“This new work is well-placed alongside other work being done around the world,” Taglialatela said. “Using antibodies to find and remove the proteins is similar to what we’d do using a virus. The idea is to hijack the body’s immune system so that it will work not just against foreign bodies, but against our own proteins, the ones that have become pathological.”
The dementia and related symptoms that make Alzheimer’s such a curse are related to a buildup of these poisonous proteins in the brain, though the root cause remains unclear. The early vaccine model would use a person’s antibodies to latch onto and transport these hazardous materials out of the brain, possibly eliminating some or all of the symptoms of the disease.
This approach would not prevent the constant formation of more toxins and it could introduce another problem: When a patient tries a new drug that produces dangerous side effects, these generally cease when the drug is discontinued, but when a vaccine engenders problems in a particular patient, it simply isn’t possible to un-vaccinate them.
“People vaccinated would generate their own antibodies against the plaque-forming proteins,” Taglialatela said. “But once you have induced this formation, there’s no way out. We really don’t know what the normal functions of one of these two proteins is, so its removal might lead to problems.”
The problem may be too complex for a simple vaccine to address, Taglialatela said. The root cause behind the brain’s production of these bad actors may be a better place to look when seeking to bring a halt to the specific disease processes that lie behind Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Addressing the currently unknown cause is more elegant, but probably more difficult than attempting to clean up its consequences.
Some of the Australian scientists involved in the vaccine work are also principals in the vaccine company that could profit from any commercialization of the discovery. This overlap is not uncommon for high-profile, international medical research teams.
Rick Cousins can be reached at rick.cousins@galvnews.com.