At a recent meeting on “Research priorities for preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias” (ADRD), convened by the National Academies, one consensus priority on ADRD research was that there needs to be more of it at every stage. Several speakers presented stark numbers on the relative volume of research in cancer and neurodegeneration. Research output, measured in peer-reviewed papers, for dementia is estimated to be around 10,000 papers annually, compared to 150,000 for cancer, while AD clinical trials are also few and far between compared to cancer trials. This final installment of BioWorld’s series on Alzheimer’s explores some of the reasons for this discrepancy along with the latest advances and ongoing efforts to accelerate research and drug development in the field.
Volastra Therapeutics Inc. has entered into partnerships with Microsoft Corp., Function Oncology Inc. and Tailor Bio Ltd. with the goal of expanding the potential use of its KIF18A inhibitors.
Plasma pharmacodynamic biomarkers may be a reliable tool for biosimilarity assessment without having to rely on clinical trials, which are costly and time consuming.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease for which there is a 10% rate of familial cases, with the rest being sporadic cases. Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the etiology of ALS, and more than 120 genes have been reported to be tied to the disease, but few with strong association. Thus, identifying additional genes contributing to ALS will help shed light on the disease and its related therapies.
To Steve Hyman, the manual that clinicians currently use to diagnose mental disorders is an active obstacle to getting a scientific understanding of those disorders. Hyman, who is director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, MIT and Harvard, and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), listed multiple weaknesses of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose diagnoses, he said, are “arbitrary, rigid, life-stage and context-insensitive,” as well as blind to the fact that mental disorders exist along a continuum.
Patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have a median survival of 2 to 5 years. There are 3 FDA-approved drugs for ALS (riluzole, edaravone and Relyvrio [phenylbuturate/taurursodiol]), but they only lead to modest benefit. There are several pathways involved in the disease, but all of them lead to neuroinflammation.
Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is an inflammatory skin disease with significant diagnostic delay. Type XXII collagen is a fibrillar collagen located in the skin epidermis. Reliable biomarkers to aid in the diagnosis of HS and monitor the severity of disease are needed.
Work was conducted at the University of Bialystok to study plasma galectins (1, 2 and 12) plus serum and urinary levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF), endothelin-1 (ET-1) and α1-acid-glycoprotein (α1AGP) in regards to the relationship between psoriasis and its related complications.
Iron-sulfur clusters are co-factors that are involved in several biological processes, such as oxidative phosphorylation, enzymatic reactions, and DNA replication and repair. Scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have presented a study regarding the clinical manifestations associated with a novel neuromuscular disease gene – CIAO1 – which encodes probable cytosolic iron-sulfur protein assembly protein CIAO1 and is an essential member in the cytoplasmic iron-sulfur assembly machinery.
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