Researchers hope the new approach may one day overcome one of the biggest obstacles to development of new dementia medications – the difficulty in finding drugs that can safely cross the blood-brain barrier.
The results of the research surprised the scientists working in the lab of Richard Flavell, senior author of the paper, chairman of the Department of Immunobiology at Yale and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Flavell’s team originally thought that blocking the immune system molecule TGF-â(or transforming growth factor), might actually increase the buildup of amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s Disease
the team found that as much as 90 percent of the plaques were eliminated from the brains of mice genetically engineered to block TGF-â in the peripheral immune cells.
It was like a vacuum cleaner had removed the plaques,” Flavell said.