The Alzheimer

A new nasal Spray Vaccine promises to protect Against the terrible disease

Researchers are working on a nasally-delivered vaccine that promises to protect against both Alzheimer’s and Stroke, repairing vascular damage in the brain

One in eight Americans will fall prey to Alzheimer's disease at some point in their life, current statistics say. Because Alzheimer's is associated with vascular damage in the brain, many of them will succumb through a painful and potentially fatal stroke.

But researchers led by Dr. Dan Frenkel of Tel Aviv University's Department of Neurobiology at the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences are working on a nasally-delivered 2-in-1 vaccine that promises to protect against both Alzheimer's and stroke. The new vaccine repairs vascular damage in the brain by rounding up "troops" from the body's own immune system.



And in addition to its prophylactic effect, it can work even when Alzheimer's symptoms are already present. The research on this new technology was recently accepted for publication in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

A natural way to fight Alzheimer's
"Using part of a drug that was previously tested as an influenza drug, we've managed to successfully induce an immune response against amyloid proteins in the blood vessels," says Dr. Frenkel, who collaborated on this project with Prof. Howard L. Weiner of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. "In early pre-clinical studies, we've found it can prevent both brain tissue damage and restore cognitive impairment," he adds.

Modifying a vaccine technology owned by Glaxo Smith Kline, a multinational drug company, Tel Aviv University's new therapeutic approach activates a natural mechanism in our bodies that fights against vascular damage in the brain.



The vaccine, Dr. Frenkel explains, activates macrophages — large proteins in the body that swallow foreign antigens. When the vaccine activates large numbers of these macrophages, they clear away the damaging build-up of waxy amyloid proteins in our brain's vascular system.

Animal models showed that once these proteins are cleared from the brain, further damage can be prevented, and existing damage due to a previous stroke can be repaired.

A new road to an Alzheimer's cure?
Could the breakthrough lead to both a vaccine and a long-sought cure for Alzheimer's disease? "It appears that this could be the case," says Dr. Frenkel, who worked on the study with his doctoral student Veronica Lifshitz and master degree students Ronen Weiss and Tali Benromano. "We've found a way to use the immune response stimulated by this drug to prevent hemorrhagic strokes which lead to permanent brain damage," he says.

In the animal models in mice, Dr. Frenkel's team worked with MRI specialist Prof. Yaniv Assaf and his Ph.D. student Tamar Blumenfeld-Katzir of Tel Aviv University's Department of Neurobiology and then with "object recognition" experiments, testing their cognitive functioning both before and after administration of the vaccine. MRI screenings confirmed that, after the vaccine was administered, further vascular damage was prevented, and the object recognition experiments indicated that those animals treated with the new vaccine returned to normal behavior.



Dr. Frenkel believes that this approach, when applied to a human test population, will be able to prevent the downward health spiral of Alzheimer's and dementia. The vaccine could be given to people who are at risk, those who show very early symptoms of these diseases, and those who have already suffered strokes to repair any vascular damage.
So far the vaccine has shown no signs of toxicity in animal models. Dr. Frenkel is hopeful that this new approach could lead to a cure, or at least an effective treatment, for the vascular dementia found in 80% of all people with Alzheimer's.
Source : Tel Aviv University

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Amazing breakthrough: Progress in World’s First Alzheimer’s Vaccine

Researchers have made a breakthrough discovery in the international quest to discover a new and potentially effective vaccine targeting the pathological proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

With more than 7.5 million new cases of Alzheimer’s disease a year, the race to find a vaccine and effective treatment for dementia is growing by the day.

Now researchers in the US and Australia have make a breakthrough discovery in the international quest to discover a new and potentially effective vaccine targeting the pathological proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia in the elderly.

In research findings just released in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal, Flinders University experts as part of a high-level US research team at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) and University of California, Irvine (UCI) have made a successful vaccine formulation that targets the abnormal beta-amyloid and tau proteins that signal Alzheimer’s disease.



With more than 48 million dementia cases in 2015, Alzheimer’s is emerging as one of the biggest cost to the world’s health-care systems, especially in mature economies in western countries.

The World Health Organization has projected the total global societal cost of dementia-related illnesses and care at more than $US600 billion a year.

“If we are successful in pre-clinical trials, in three to five years we could be well on the way to one of the most important developments in recent medical history,” says Flinders University School of Medicine Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, who also is director of South Australian vaccine research company Vaxine Pty Ltd.



“Along with our rapidly ageing populations, we now know that the explosion in type 2 diabetes in the West is likely to further dramatically fuel the projected rise in the number of cases of dementia globally, with diabetes being the major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease,” Professor Petrovsky says.

The scale of the dementia problem has seen the US Congress commit a further $US350 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research into Alzheimer’s disease, taking research funding in the US to more than $US1.3 billion this year.

With NIH and Alzheimer’s Association funding, the US researchers say they have developed an “exceptional” universal vaccine platform, called MultiTEP, to target the hallmark proteins, aberrant forms of AB and tau proteins.

β-amyloid (AB) is a protein found to be prominent in driving Alzheimer’s disease, but the accumulation of pathological tau also correlates with the formation of dementia in Alzheimer’s patients.



Using a combination of anti-amyloid-beta and anti-tau vaccines with powerful and safe adjuvant technology called Advax™ developed by Vaxine Pty Ltd “shows promise for both preventive and therapeutic approaches in AD,” Professor David Cribbs from the UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND) told Bloomberg news agency in the US.
Professor Michael Agadjanyan, head of IMM Department of Molecular Immunology, says the MultiTEP platform-based vaccines “do not induce potentially harmful auto-reactive cellular immune responses, while still generating antibodies that bind strongly to the amyloid and tau pathological molecules in brain tissue from AD patients”.

Co-author of the latest paper, IMM Department of Molecular Immunology, Associate Professor Anahit Ghochikyan, says: “This study suggests that we can immunize patients at the early stages of AD, or even healthy people at risk for AD, using our anti-amyloid-beta vaccine, and, if the disease progresses, then vaccinate with another anti-tau vaccine to increase effectiveness.”



She says the cooperative studies with National Institute of Aging IMM scientists and collaborators from UCI and the University of Southern California are working with experts from four companies to conduct non-clinical safety-toxicology studies to fulfil US Government safety standards for the Investigational New Drug application.

After completion of these pre-clinical studies, they plan to test the immunogenicity and efficacy of the new vaccines in human trials.



Source: Flinders University
Neuroscience News

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