Old antibiotic takes on Alzheimer’s
By John Travis
From New Orleans, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Investigators are testing whether an antibiotic that manufacturers pulled from the U.S. market several decades ago for safety concerns can slow or prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Many neuroscientists believe that a buildup in the brain of a protein fragment called beta-amyloid causes Alzheimer’s disease. Over the past few years, Ashley T. Bush of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his colleagues have gathered evidence that copper and zinc in the brain promote beta-amyloid accumulation. In test tubes, for example, zinc triggers beta-amyloid molecules to form insoluble masses. In a study last year, the researchers even reported that chelating agents, which trap and remove metals from tissues, dissolve beta-amyloid in brain tissue taken from people who had died of Alzheimer’s disease.