Doctors Plan to Test a Gene Therapy That Could Prevent Alzheimer's Disease

Doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine in May will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the APOE gene variant that makes carriers highly susceptible to Alzheimer's will receive infusions of the variant with the lowest risk, reports Technology Review . Should this procedure retard disease progression in people who already have Alzheimer's, it could eventually lead to prevention therapy. Gene replacement efforts typically use viruses to carry DNA instructions into a person's cells, in attempts to correct rare diseases by replacing a single dysfunctional gene. Weill Cornell Medicine's Ronald Crystal said the project avoids the debate over the actual cause of Alzheimer's. "The approach we took is to ignore all that and think about it from a genetic point of view," he noted. Weill Cornell Medicine is currently seeking persons with two copies of the high-risk APOE gene who already are suffering memory loss, or even have an Alzheimer's diagnosis. The initial volunteers will receive an infusion into their spinal cords of billions of viruses carrying the low-risk APOE variant.