REPORT FROM THE FIRST CLINICAL TRIALS ON ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE (CTAD) ASIA-CHINA 2018 : BRINGING TOGETHER GLOBAL LEADERS

Author(s):  
J.K. Chhetri ◽  
P. Chan ◽  
B. Vellas ◽  
J. Touchon ◽  
S. Gauthier

Population of older adults in Asia, and particularly in China is increasing rapidly. Older population are at increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias. Soon, the Chinese population with AD will represent almost half of the world’s AD population. There is a desperate need of disease modifying therapies to delay or slow the progression of AD, to tackle this emerging healthcare emergency. In this context, the first CTAD Asia-China conference was held in China to bring together Western and Asian leaders in AD. This meeting focused largely on how to develop successful trials in China, utilizing past experiences from the West.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (577) ◽  
pp. eaax0914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery W. Kelly

Pharmacological evidence, from clinical trials where patients with systemic amyloid diseases are treated with disease-modifying therapies, supports the notion that protein aggregation drives tissue degeneration in these disorders. The protein aggregate structures driving tissue pathology and the commonalities in etiology between these diseases and Alzheimer’s disease are under investigation.


Author(s):  
Joshua D. Grill ◽  
Jeffrey Cummings

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is growing in frequency rapidly and represents an area of urgent need in medical research. Now the sixth leading cause of death, AD is expected to triple in prevalence in coming decades. Key to averting the personal and international toll of AD will be clinical trials to examine the safety and efficacy of potentially disease-slowing therapies. These studies face a variety of challenges, including imperfect outcome measures, unvalidated surrogate biomarkers, and often slow and challenging recruitment. Nevertheless, a large number of promising potential therapies are in development. If successful and started early enough, these treatments could reduce the societal impact of AD. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the methodologies and designs of AD trials of potential disease-modifying therapies, the challenges these studies meet, and the targets and potential treatments that are currently in development.


2017 ◽  
Vol 474 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Ugbode ◽  
Yuhan Hu ◽  
Benjamin Whalley ◽  
Chris Peers ◽  
Marcus Rattray ◽  
...  

Astrocytes play a fundamental role in maintaining the health and function of the central nervous system. Increasing evidence indicates that astrocytes undergo both cellular and molecular changes at an early stage in neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). These changes may reflect a change from a neuroprotective to a neurotoxic phenotype. Given the lack of current disease-modifying therapies for AD, astrocytes have become an interesting and viable target for therapeutic intervention. The astrocyte transport system covers a diverse array of proteins involved in metabolic support, neurotransmission and synaptic architecture. Therefore, specific targeting of individual transporter families has the potential to suppress neurodegeneration, a characteristic hallmark of AD. A small number of the 400 transporter superfamilies are expressed in astrocytes, with evidence highlighting a fraction of these are implicated in AD. Here, we review the current evidence for six astrocytic transporter subfamilies involved in AD, as reported in both animal and human studies. This review confirms that astrocytes are indeed a viable target, highlights the complexities of studying astrocytes and provides future directives to exploit the potential of astrocytes in tackling AD.


2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-110 ◽  

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a disorder of two pathologies- plaques and tangles. The former have as a key constituent amyloid protein and the latter the microtubule-associaied protein tau. Genetics has demonstrated that changes in either protein are sufficient to cause dementia. The amyloid cascade hypothesis proposes that plaque-related changes precede tangle-related changes and positions amyloid as central to the degeneration of AD. All the evidence suggests this is correct, including evidence that presenil ins alter the processing of the amyloid precursor protein and evidence that disrupting the normal properties of tau underlies the related froniotemporal dementias. The amyloid cascade hypothesis has provided the basis for nearly a decade of intensive basic science - the skeleton of that hypothesis can now be fleshed out, and confidence is growing that this will result in useful disease-modifying therapies in the future.


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