A drug commonly used to treat glaucoma has been shown in zebrafish and mice to protect against the build-up in the brain of the protein tau, which causes various forms of dementia and is implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
A drug commonly used to treat glaucoma has been shown in zebrafish and mice to protect against the build-up in the brain of the protein tau, which causes various forms of dementia and is implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
Tauopathies are neurodegenerative diseases characterised by the build-up in the brain of tau protein 'aggregates' within nerve cells. These include forms of dementia, Pick's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy, where tau is believed to be the primary disease driver, and Alzheimer's disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy , where tau build-up is one consequence of disease but results in degeneration of brain tissue.
Dr Ana Lopez Ramirez from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, joint first author, said:"Zebrafish provide a much more effective and realistic way of screening drug compounds than using cell cultures, which function quite differently to living organisms.
Analysis of the mouse brains showed that they indeed had fewer tau aggregates, and consequently a lesser reduction in brain cells, compared with the untreated mice. "This shows how we can use zebrafish to test whether existing drugs might be repurposed to tackle different diseases, potentially speeding up significantly the drug discovery process."
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