Researchers Hope Dementia Vaccine Will Be the Breakthrough of the Next Decade

Australian researchers are hoping an experimental dementia vaccine will lead to human trials and emerge as the breakthrough of the 2020s, reports ABC News Radio . Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky reported successful drug tests on mice, which had been genetically engineered to develop dementia and Alzheimer's. "We were able to prevent the memory loss in the mice, and obviously the next step is to take this into human clinical trials," Petrovsky said. He developed the vaccine, while the Institute for Molecular Medicine and the University of California are spearheading and funding research. "With the vaccine, what we're doing is getting the immune system to make antibodies that can recognize . . . abnormal clumps of protein and will actually pull them out of the system and break them down," Petrovsky explained. He added that in animals, the vaccine can prevent the development of memory loss by administering the drug before protein clumps start accruing, "but we can also show that even when we give it after the animals have proteins, we can actually get rid of the abnormal proteins."