Japanese Scientists Make Alzheimers Progress

grammar fascist writes "The AP wire reports that Japanese medical researchers have developed a DNA-based vaccine that reduces the brain plaque beta amyloid without the severe brain inflammation that plagued successes in 2002. From the story 'The deposits have been cut by between 15.5 percent and 38.5 percent in mice, with no major side effects, researchers said Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [...] If all goes well, this type of treatment might be available for people in six or seven years, [lead researcher Yoh Matsumoto] said.'"

Biotech vs. IT Careers

[billstewart]

I'm 50. It'd be really nice if they've got that Alzheimer's vaccine down solid in 10 years and seriously improved by 20 years, because I really don't want to get it. It'll also be seriously good for US society if most of the baby boomers who would have been getting it avoid it, so you younger folks don't have to spend as much taking care of us, or at least can deal with mentally competent frail old people. While we're at it, I hope the get the cancer stuff nailed down.

I've been doing various IT-like things my whole career, whether it's programming, consulting, or whatever. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm not particularly a biotech type, but I hope the tools we've built over the last few decades help the biotech folks do a much better job.

Re:Biotech vs. IT Careers

[xtal]

Kinda makes you think about taking up smoking, eh?

Well you know. Smoking takes ten years off your life." Well it's the ten worst years, isn't it folks? It's the ones at the end! It's the wheelchair kidney dialysis fucking years. You can have those years!

Food for thought, as I watch my relatives fall victim to severe mental deterioration.

Bio-informatics

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

There are some nify algorithms for searching DNA sequences, and unspeakable data loads from some experiments (not quite as bad as high energy physics but severe).

There's lots of room for an IT person to contribute to biotech.

Folding@Home

[nacturation]

Rather than waiting for ET to call or look for prime numbers, donate your spare CPU cycles to running the Folding@Home [stanford.edu] client. Its goal is to find out why proteins (mis)fold and how that affects things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancer, Huntington's, and related diseases. Damn, would it be cool to have it be my computer that identified an alien signal... but since a close relative has been diagnosed with Parkinson's I'd much rather do something that's more immediately beneficial.

It'd be interesting to hear if/how the Folding@Home project has helped out groups like this.
 

Re:Biotech vs. IT Careers

[glitch!]

Kinda makes you think about taking up smoking, eh?

You probably don't know how insightful your comment really is. There seems to be evidence of a link between alzheimers and acetylcholine in the brain and nicotine helping the overall situation. More study is obviously needed for us to find out if nicotine really does help treat or prevent alzheimers or if it is just some chance anomoly.

Food for thought, as I watch my relatives fall victim to severe mental deterioration.

Please, do a google search for "nicotine alzheimer's acetylcholine" and/or similar terms and see if you can dig up anything useful to your situation. I lost one of my grandfathers two decades ago to alzheimers and commercial tobaccco related diseases. Note the key point of commercial/poisonous tobacco here. He had to quit smoking many years before alzheimers kicked in, and now I have to wonder whether nicotine patches (or whatever) might have prevented the truly gut wrenching problems of alzheimers in his last few years of life.

Re:Alzheimer's Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The pharma company did report the brain swelling issue as part of the clinical trials, and suspended the AN-1792 program. A month or two ago, the latest theory I saw was that AN-1792 didn't even cause the brain swelling; it was caused by a different drug given concurrently. 2. There is some risk of COX-2 inhibitors causing heart attacks at a higher rate than placebo. The real comparison that needs to be done, however is what is the risk of COX-2 inhibitors versus over-the-counter NSAID's. This study is currently being done for Celebrex and NSAID's. 3. The FDA is very good at protecting patients from adverse events caused by drugs. The FDA is not so good at protecting patients by making sure that drugs of high therapeutic value are brought to market as rapidly as possible and kept on the market when therapeutic value outweighs the adverse events. The Vioxx debacle has politicized drug approvals and drug safety. 4. I'd rather take a risky Alzheimer's treatment if it slowed or reversed the disease, versus being safe from a drug, but unable to function as a human being.

Re:Biotech vs. IT Careers

[Eivind]

Except smoking significantly reduces your healthy years too. Smokers don't just on the average die sooner than non-smokers -- they also on the average get sick sooner. Really, it's a nonsense argument, if you really considered living those last sick years a net detriment rather than a net benefit, suicide at the point where you get sick would be the only logical choise.

Somehow, most people change their mind on this the minute they are sick. (ok, so some old people do commit suicide, but it's not exactly the majority.)

Re:Alzheimers Prevention

[Chode2235]

All that they really need to do is prevent its onset by about 10-15 years. If they could do this it would essentially eliminate the disease, as it arrives very late in life. They don't really need an outright cure, but some way to slow it down to the point where we will likely be dead from other things before we really have to worry about Alzheimers.

There was a great documentary on PBS called "The Forgetting," which went into this, I highly recommend it. http://www.pbs.org/theforgetting/coping/planning.h tml [pbs.org]