By Charles Glabe, Ph.D. University of California at Irvine
Professor, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, School of Biological Sciences.

The current treatments for AD target the disease symptoms and to prevent or cure AD, new treatments are needed that target the causes of the disease.  Aß oligomers are a leading candidate for causing AD, so it makes sense to develop strategies to prevent their formation, promote their elimination or inhibit their toxic activity.

The core research effort currently funded by Cure Alzheimer’s Fund is the Alzheimer's Genome Project™ initiative. This project, entirely funded by Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, is being led by Dr. Rudolph Tanzi at Massachusetts General Hospital. The objective is to identify all genes that contribute significant risk for Alzheimer’s disease, thereby identifying more targets for the development of therapeutic interventions.

Cure Alzheimer's Fund's core research effort continues to be the Alzheimer’s Genome Project™ initiative. Using whole genome association to analyze DNA, the objective is to identify all the genes that affect risk for AD. That project, largely based at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, continues and is on time for completion by summer of 2008.

From an article in Medical News Today about a paper recently released in the journal Neuron, June 7, 2007:

Researchers from the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (MGH-MIND) have discovered how brain cells affected by stroke or head injury may cause generation of amyloid-beta protein, which is a key factor in the Alzheimer’s disease story.