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Breakthrough Ultrasound Treatment To Reverse Dementia Moves To Human Trials
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs. The new announcement regarding the upcoming move to human trials is underpinned by a large funding injection from the Australian government helping accelerate the treatment's development. The first stage is a phase 1 safety trial, kicking off later in 2019, to explore the safety profile of the treatment in human subjects suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
The article seems to be behind a paywall. There's an editorial on the article describing the main points at: http://atm.amegroups.com/artic...
From that editorial: "Shimamura et al. demonstrated that a microbubble-enhanced ultrasound method successfully delivered therapeutic genes into the CNS with no evidence of brain damage". So it is not only ultrasounds that are required for this procedure to work, but some microbubble injection needed. I could not find any reference on the gas used for this microbubbles, nor their size nor how they generate them. Still sounds like a very promising treatment.
I hate signatures
Alzheimer's affects the cortex, which is on the surface of the brain.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you'd even read the article you linked, you would see that the amyloid plaque "cages" are left behind after the infectious agent has been killed, so yes, treating the plaques would actually make great sense - the human body fights off the infection and a non-invasive simple treatment removes the detritus. Of course, the testing will have to reveal how the brain reacts to this, but it could be a great way of staving off dementia.
Sure. Here's a link from a quick Google search:
https://consumer.healthday.com...
There were other drugs with the same target in at least a few other companies' research pipelines at the time, but they all ended up also fizzling out without results. This particular link is suggesting that it might slow progression, but I was under the impression that that wasn't correct either for most people with the condition. Most pharmaceutical companies have moved on to looking at tau.
They used a very highly focused ultrasound and more importantly injected the mice with a microbubble liquid. Without the microbubbles you would have to induce cavitation to get a mechanical effect on the plaque ... and that's a lot more destructive than the mild force of a bubble expanding/contracting.