New Alzheimer's Model May Help Test Novel Treatments

A study in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association suggests a new early-stage Alzheimer's disease model in rhesus macaques could find application in testing novel treatments, reports News-Medical . The investigators designed versions of the human tau gene with mutations that would cause misfolding, bundled in a virus particle and injected into the macaques' entorhinal cortex. The misfolded tau proteins had spread to other parts of the animal's brains within three months, with misfolding of the introduced human mutant tau protein and of the monkey's own tau proteins present. "This capacity to spread through brain circuits results in the damage to cortical areas responsible for higher level cognition quite distant from the entorhinal cortex," said Professor John Morrison at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC). Fellow CNPRC researcher Danielle Beckman noted that the new tau protein model likely signifies a middle stage of the disease, "before widespread cell death occurs." The next step will be to test if behavioral changes similar to human Alzheimer's disease develop in the rhesus macaque model, which could be employed to test therapies that prevent misfolding or inflammation.