A team of researchers from the University of Southampton in
England have discovered a potential solution for the side effects caused by
immunotherapy treatment for Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease. The
disease starts out slow but progresses with age. Death of nerve cells in the
brain causes Alzheimer’s. Symptoms include memory loss, impaired cognitive
skills, difficulty speaking and decision-making.
Scientists believe plaques formed by beta-amyloid (pieces of
protein) and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain causes the death of brain
cells. In the patients with Alzheimer’s, the total size of the brain shrinks,
while the tissue have constantly lesser nerve cells and connections.
The older you get, the higher is your risk of getting
Alzheimer’s. People over the age of 70 are at a higher risk of developing
Alzheimer’s. Around 80% people over the age of 85 are affected by this dreaded
disease.
An estimated 46.8 million people globally have dementia and
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia.
Around 800,000 people are affected by Alzheimer’s in the UK.
Immunotherapy is a hopeful approach for the treatment of
Alzheimer’s. The procedure uses antibodies to prompt the immune system to discard
beta-amyloid, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
Although, during test on lab mice, antibodies used against
beta-amyloid have successfully cleared plaques and reversed cognitive loss,
clinical trials showed side effects that caused inflammation in the brain of
Alzheimer’s patients, especially ARIA (amyloid-related imaging abnormalities).
ARIA causes small bleeding and threatening brain swelling.
The research team, led by Dr. Jessica Teeling, Associate
Professor in Immunology at The Centre for Biological Sciences, engineered 3
antibodies to alter the process by which they engage cells in immune system. They
discovered that small, explicit alterations in the anti-amyloid antibodies
maintained the immunotherapeutic activity but didn’t have any inflammatory side
effects.
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Dr. Teeling says it is crucial to learn more from studying
these novel interventions and optimize their effects by using antibody
engineering.
The findings of the study which was in collaboration with
Lundbeck (a multinational pharmaceutical company based in Denmark), underscore
the possibility of antibodies to terminate disease-causing plaques and suggest possible
future treatments.
The researchers believe that further work should be done to
increase potency of the antibody, but without the inflammatory side effects.
These studies give us a roadmap of how to use the advancements
of antibody engineering and apply antibody therapeutics targeting various
neurodegenerative diseases. In the future, Alzheimer’s drugs will possess new
technologies and improvements to clear plaque buildup, while keeping unharmed
other areas of the brain, concludes Dr. Stavenhagen of Lundbeck.
The study was printed in Acta
Neuropathologica.
