New research is codenamed ‘Alzheimer’s in a dish’.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BANGALORE: Two Boston based neuroscientists have replicated human brain cells in a gel, revealing trails of Alzheimer’s disease; giving hope for the researchers in finding a cure for neurodegenerative disorders.
Alzheimer’s disease, one of the worst forms of dementia in humans, is estimated to have affected the lives of five million American people, aged 65 and above. Also, about 200,000 people under the age 65 are identified as early victims of Alzheimer’s. Studies indicate that one in nine, which is approximately 11% of people at the age 65 or above have Alzheimer’s disease.
The new research, codenamed ‘Alzheimer’s in a dish’, was made possible using a gel, specially created for growing human brain cells to form networks like an actual brain.
The researchers infected the brain cells with the neuron genes of Alzheimer’s disease and within a few weeks, the brain cells started showing signs of clumps, which is also known as plaques and also coils known as tangles. These two are cited as the critical factors resulting in Alzheimer’s disease.
The neuroscientists Doo Yeon Kim and Rudolph E. Tanzi, the researchers who grew diseased cells in a petri dish said, “sure enough, we saw plaques, real plaques. We waited, and then we saw tangles, actual tangles. It looks like you are looking at an Alzheimer brain.”
For the purpose of the research, they used embryonic stem cells of humans (as it can form into any type of body cell) and harnessed it in a chemical mixture or the gel and turned the cells into neurons. As the cells turned into neurons, the researchers injected Alzheimer’s genes to let them grow in wells in petri dishes.
Leading researcher Rudolph E. Tanzi said to International Business Times that “this new system – which can be adapted to other neurodegenerative disorders – should revolutionise drug recovery in terms of speed, costs and physiologic relevance to disease.”
He added that “testing drugs in mouse models that typically have brain deposits of either plaques or tangles, but not both, takes more than a year and is very costly. Without three-dimensional model that recapitulates both plaques and tangles, we now can screen hundreds of thousands of drugs in a matter of months without using animals in a system that is considerably more relevant to the events occurring in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.”
However, the petri dish lacks some important brain components like the immune cells that gets damaged once Alzheimer’s descends upon a patient. Adding to this, the new research doesn’t allow for any drug test, which can prevent the disease from occurring.
Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Duke University, told The New York Times “It is a giant step forward for the field. It could dramatically accelerate testing of new drug candidates.”
Dr. Tanzi is currently working on a project to test petri dish using 1,200 medicines available in the market and another 5,000 experimental medicines that finished the first phase of clinical testing. All research till date to study Alzheimer’s disease was done on mice with neurodegenerative symptoms.
The report about the new research was published in the science journal Nature.