Health Story

22 November 2008 18:28 BST

Vaccine targets 'tangles' of Alzheimer's

A new vaccine could help the immune system to target a protein implicated in the development of Alzheimer's disease, researchers claim.

In people with the debilitating disease, the protein tau accumulates into 'tangles' in the memory centre of the brain.

Alzheimer's disease is one of the main forms of dementia, which affects approximately 700,000 people in the UK.

In a promising step for sufferers, researchers from the New York University School of Medicine say they have created a vaccine which suppresses the build-up of tau in tests on mice.

Publishing their finding in the Journal of Neuroscience, they argue that the vaccine successfully slowed the deterioration of motor abilities produced by great amounts of tau in the mice's central nervous system.

The vaccine worked by helping the immune system to produce antibodies that enter the brain and bind to irregular tau, preventing their grouping and the associated negative effects.

"This approach may have extensive therapeutic implications because you can specifically target the problematic protein," said Dr Einar Sigurdsson.

He added that the findings could impact on another cause of Alzheimer's disease: the build-up of amyloid beta in the brain.

"It's likely that there's a synergism in the pathology," he explained. "Amyloid pathology may cause tau pathology and tau pathology might cause more amyloid pathology. What you have is a vicious cycle. If you can target both of these proteins you’ll likely have more efficacious treatment."

Further studies are now planned on mice which slowly develop tangles and cognitive impairments without movement problems.