Scientists Replicate Alzheimer’s in Petri Dish
Scientists Replicate Alzheimer’s in petri dish – Scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital have found a way of replicating Alzheimer’s disease synthetically in gel.
Scientists have taken a big step towards better understanding Alzheimer’s disease by replicating it with brain cells in a petri dish. Scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston managed to recreate the effects of Alzheimer’s on brain cells by first using gel to foster the growth of networks like you find in the brain with brain cells grown from embryonic stem cells. Scientists, led by Dr. Rudy Tanzi, then introduced the genes for Alzheimer’s disease, and saw as the two characteristics of the disease—plaques and tangles—developed.
Tanzi is widely recognized as a leading expert in the field of Alzheimer’s research, having spearheaded the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund for research efforts as well as researching the disease for more than 30 years. Still, the New York Times reports, the crucial idea of growing the cells in gel actually came from one of Tanzi’s colleagues, Dr. Doo Yeon Kim.
The study, published in the journal, Nature, said that this way of modeling gives credence to a longstanding theory that one of the driving causes behind the formation of plaques and tangles is the production and accumulation of beta amyloid protein the brain. Previous methods of modeling the disease to know the role of amyloids involved studying mice. But that method of studying took considerably longer and didn’t necessarily yield benefits because of the differences between brains of mice and humans.
Alzheimer’s disease affects more than 25 million people around the world, so there’s a large effort to better understand the disease and eventually to find a cure. There are a number of drugs that aim to treat Alzheimer’s with varied effectiveness but there are many more that have yet to be tested. And that’s one area where Dr. Tanzi hopes his research can help. Tanzi told the Times, he plans on using the new method to test some 1,200 drugs that are already on the market , and another 5,000 that are still in testing.
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