Alzheimer’s Study Sheds Light on Prenatal Brain Development

Seattle – U.S. biotechnology company Genentech Inc has published a new study in the journal Nature that reveals an interesting link between the way Alzheimer’s disease kills brain cells and the way the brain forms during prenatal development.

It was already known that a protein called amyloid precursor protein, or APP, was part of the mechanism by which Alzheimer’s disease causes brain cell death. However, until now it has not been clear what the APP protein does in a healthy person. Since it was know that APP had some role in the disease, drug companies and researchers have been working on creating medications that would interfere with the APP protein.

“The key player we’re focusing on is a protein called APP [amyloid precursor protein]. We know that APP is a bad actor in Alzheimer’s, but it has been unclear how it participates,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, executive vice president of research drug discovery at Genentech.

What is important about the Genentech research is that they have studied the purpose of the APP protein in early fetal brain development. It seems that APP kills non-needed nerve fibers during early brain development as part of the normal prenatal development of the brain.

“Now, instead of having one dog in the race, there are two. It’s a very exciting paper. It’s going to have a major impact on research in the Alzheimer’s filed,” said Paul Greengard, a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York.

Tessier-Lavigne explained that by performing cell culture experiments they were able to show the APP protein binding to a part of the brain cell called death receptor 6. This event triggers nerve cells to die.

Astoundingly, the study showed that when death receptor 6 is blocked the nerve cells do not shrivel in the presence of APP. This leads to the possibility of developing a drug treatment that could block the so called death receptor 6 instead of simply trying to block the APP protein.

As many as 5.2 million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s.

Thursday morning trading saw Genentech trading at $85.17