February 9, 2012

expert reaction to Bexarotene reversing Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice as published in Science Express

Science Express pubilshed details of a mouse study which showed the compound Bexarotene could reverse the build up of amyloid in the brain, one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

Prof John Hardy, Professor of Neuroscience, University College London (UCL), said:

“This work is good and convincing. It’s an approach that has been pursued by pharmaceuticals for a few years for cancer but sadly has some nasty side effects. Hopefully it now will get another look in for Alzheimer’s. It is worth remembering that the prognosis of Alzheimer’s disease is worse than the prognosis for cancer.”

Prof Derek Hill, Professor of Medical Imaging Science, UCL, and CEO of IXICO, said:

“Demonstrating that potential drugs for treating Alzheimer’s are safe and effective takes many years, and requires large scale trials on 1000s of patients. Testing the drugs on transgenic mice as done in this paper is an important early step. However, the drug development world is littered with drugs that seemed to work on transgenic mice, but didn’t work on people. A programme of clinical trials is now needed to assess whether these potentially promising results translate into an effect on the human disease.”

Prof David Allsop, Professor of Neuroscience, Lancaster University, said:

“It looks promising in the mouse model, but, in recent years, these types of experiments in mice have not translated well into humans, and so it is too early to get excited about the prospect of an effective therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Many drugs fail when they go into humans, for various reasons. Also, the senile plaques are not thought to be the toxic form of the amyloid, and so clearing away the plaques is not necessarily going to be beneficial, and could actually be harmful. The researchers need to show that they can block the formation of the earlier aggregating forms of the amyloid, even before they reach the senile plaque stage. I would say that the results should be treated with cautious optimism.”

‘ApoE-Directed Therapeutics Rapidly Clear β-Amyloid and Reverse Deficits in AD Mouse Models’ by Paige E. Cramer et al., published in Science Express on Thursday 9th February.