USA2 SPOTLIGHT

An April 4, 2017 Wall Street Journal opinion piece (subscription required) by UsAgainstAlzheimer’s Chairman, George Vradenburg and Dr. Howard Fillit, Chief Science Officer, Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, called on the FDA to declare war on Alzheimer’s. According to the authors, “President Trump’s nominee for FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, begins his confirmation process Wednesday. If confirmed, he should encourage FDA’s career scientists to play a major role in a desperately needed war on Alzheimer’s disease.”

MUST READS

An April 4, 2017 Minn Post article looked at the potential negative effects of the President’s proposed 2018 budget on discovery and innovation. The budget request includes a proposed 18% cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s premier government agency supporting biomedical research. Last year, NIH funding composed nearly one-third of the University of Minnesota’s external research awards. These awards have supported everything from replacement heart valves that grow along with a child recipient to international clinical trials for more effective HIV treatments, to better pain control without the need for opioids to potential reversal of memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients.

According to an April 4, 2017 Harvard Gazette article, Alzheimer’s researchers are beginning to turn toward early detection and prevention, including healthy lifestyle changes, as opposed to treatment post-diagnosis. New findings that amyloid beta accumulates in the brain a decade or more before symptoms occur, coupled with the recent failures in AD clinical trials, are supporting the “catch it early” idea. University of Southern California researchers are working on the A4 trial, the first to test on people who are ‘preclinical.’

An April 3, 2017 Telegram.com article highlights prevention as the newest focus in Alzheimer’s disease research. Brain changes resulting in AD can show up 15 to 20 years prior to diagnosis. Clinical research trials on treatment have been disappointing. “The research was hopeful but not terribly realistic,” according to Jonathan Jackson, from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Diet modification has been shown to reduce the risk of dementia by 57%.

RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

An April 5, 2017 Guardian article spotlighted Australian researchers at the Queensland Brain Institute, who discovered that noninvasive ultrasound can effectively and safely deliver drugs to a damaged brain. The technique successfully penetrated the blood-brain barrier to deliver a therapeutic antibody to the brain that specifically binds to a protein called tau, implicated in the progression of Alzheimer’s.

An April 4, 2017 JAMA Network article looks at “SuperAgers,” previously defined as adults 80 years and older, with episodic memory ability at least as good as that of average middle-age adults. SuperAgers may experience similar atrophy rates as their cognitively average peers but start with larger brain volumes, or they may resist age-related cortical atrophy.