A new nasal spray could boost memory and fight dementia , specifically Alzheimer's , according to a study conducted by an international team led by researchers at the University of Texas.
The novel nasal spray is expected to bypass the blood-brain barrier , with the study showing that it broke apart tangles of tau proteins in the brains of mice that were tested in the study.
The drug is also reportedly effective at clearing similar tangles that appear between neurons in human brains. It was specifically designed to target and destroy toxic buildups of the protein that are known to lead to or contribute to dementia, specifically Alzheimer's.
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Research indicates that the buildups can harm and kill brain cells, hence why so many researchers and pharmaceutical companies are attempting to produce drugs that can help alleviate the buildups and potentially cure or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
The struggle when developing this new medicine, however, was figuring out how it could break through the blood-brain barrier and start working in the brain's cells, Science Alert reported.
The solution ended up being packaging the medicine into tiny bubbles, which are able to slip past cell membranes, it was reported. Neuroscientist Sagar Gaikwad and his team explained the method and then tried the medicine model on the mice with success.
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In the mice, a single spray resulted in improved cognitive functions after just two weeks. But whether the medicine would have the same effect on humans remains to be seen, as the biology of both creatures is different, and humans are obviously much larger than mice.
University of Edinburgh neuroscientists Soraya Meftah, Claire Durrant and Tara Spires-Jones, who were not involved in the study but who did a review of its findings that was published in Science Translational Medicine, however, noted that many tau-based therapies targeted at eliminating buildups in the brain in humans have "so far failed."
The University of Edinburgh scientists said that much more research needs to be done, but at the moment, the study by the University of Texas looks promising, and Gaikwad and his colleagues who conducted it are also hopeful.
The experiments on humans so far have reportedly occurred on postmortem human brain tissue donated by patients with Alzheimer's disease or with dementia who carried Lewy bodies or Pick's disease, a form of frontotemporal dementia. In all the deceased brains, the antibody medicine reportedly cleared away the tau tangles and also stopped the release of what is referred to as "tau seeds," which travel between connected neurons and tangle up other areas of the brain.
The authors of the study wrote , "Many open questions remain, including whether this treatment delivered intranasally in humans will allow penetration of the antibody in effective doses throughout our much larger brains and whether there are any potentially dangerous side effects like inflammation, which is a concern in all of the amyloid-directed immunotherapy trials. Despite these limitations, this is an important piece of work."
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