Last week I read about a promising new treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. It involves some ground-breaking work by Mark Pepsys, professor of medicine at University College in London.
For the past 30 years, Mr. Pepsys has been working on curing diseases that are caused by the abnormal buildup of amyloid protein. This protein is a key cause in the development of Alzheimer’s, as it gums up the works of the brain. In the 1990s he developed a drug called CPHPC that removes SAP, a blood protein that sticks to amyloid and prevents enzymes from dissolving it. This allows a kind of crust to form in the brain cells, (think of it as hair filling up your shower drain) that eventually stops brain function in certain areas, such as memory.
Mr. Pspsys gave CPHPC to five Alzheimer’s patients and the results were quite encouraging, to the point where this might pose as a medical breakthrough. It appears that Mr. Pspsys is getting some major pharmaceutical companies to show interest in his (hoped for) clinical trial of 80-100 patients. This trial, should it get funded, may prove to be the first real breakthrough in Alzheimer’s treatment.
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