By Laurel Lyle | Director-Fundraising Programs
A team led by Cure Alzheimer’s Fund Research Consortium Chair Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D., has, for the first time created ‘Alzheimer’s in a dish’ – a combination of both amyloid and tau pathology in human nerve cells living inside a Petri dish.
In September the journal Nature published a study led by Dr. Tanzi that for the first time induced the creation of both key aspects of Alzheimer’s pathologies – amyloid plaques and tau tangles – in human nerve cells with a known Alzheimer’s gene mutation. These nerve cells had been developed first from human stem cells. “In summary, we have successfully recapitulated Abeta and tau pathology in a single 3-D human neural cell culture system for the first time,” wrote Tanzi and fellow researchers in the magazine. Further, the group reported it was able to inhibit both Abeta and tau. “This is a big deal,” Tanzi says. “It creates a near-ideal lab model of the disease that will help us dramatically accelerate the process of drug testing.
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