(Press-News.org) EAST LANSING, Mich. - A promising new natural treatment for Alzheimer's disease is moving toward clinical trials. This will be a major step forward as there is nothing on the market that slows the progression of Alzheimer's.
Muraleedharan Nair, Michigan State University natural products chemist, has patented a botanical compound, withanamides. His spinoff company, Natural Therapeutics, will begin the trials as soon as funding is in place.
To date, none of the major pharmaceutical companies - Merck, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb - have been able to produce an effective treatment that passed human clinical trials, Nair said.
"This particular research has focused on Ashwagandha, an herbal remedy that's been used in Eastern medicines for centuries," he said. "Our compound withanamides may work to prevent Alzheimer's disease at the onset, and it also could prevent its progression."
While plants cannot be patented, compounds from it can. MSU holds the patent for withanamides, and earlier research revealed that the compound, found in the plants' seeds, proved to be a powerful anti-oxidant - double the strength of what's on today's market. The potent compound has shown that it can protect cells against damaging attacks by a rogue protein ¬- the earliest stage of Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's begins when a specific protein starts breaking, or cleaving, at the wrong place to produce an unwanted fragment. This bad fragment, called BAP, stresses cells' membranes, sparks plaque formation and eventually kills the cells. This attack begins in the frontal lobe, erasing memories and continuing its unrelenting assault deeper into the brain.
A complicating factor is that the majority of protein cleaving is a natural, healthy process. Pharmaceutical companies, however, have focused their efforts on blocking the tiny faction of bad cleaving of the protein producing BAP.
"Rather than trying to stop only the malevolent cleaving, our compound keeps the bad protein from entering the cell where it does its damage," he said. "Our studies have shown that withanamides effectively protect the brain cells by neutralizing the effect of BAP."
Nair, who holds nearly 90 U.S. and international patents, is using withanamides to interrupt the action of BAP, hence preventing Alzheimer's at an early stage.
Nair and his collaborators published in Phytotherapy Research that withanamides protected mouse brain cells from BAP damage. A recent study, also published in Phytotherapy Research and using mouse models, showed that withanamides passed the blood brain barrier, the filter that controls what chemicals reach the brain. The results showed that the compound reached its intended target, passing the last test before advancing to human testing.
After the clinical trials, which could be conducted as quick as six to twelve months, Nair and Natural Therapeutics will pursue FDA approval.
"Dr. Nair discovered his molecule in a food-safe plant," said Jim Richter, Natural Therapeutics President. "It's also classified as GRAS - generally regarded as safe - by the FDA. This means that we can bypass many of the hurdles that slow synthetic molecules that need testing. By compressing the timeline dramatically, we'll be able to save tens of millions of dollars, and if successful, bring an effective treatment to Alzheimer's patients."
INFORMATION:
This research was funded in part by MSU AgBioResearch.
Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 150 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.
For MSU news on the Web, go to MSUToday. Follow MSU News on Twitter at twitter.com/MSUnews.
Very old persons often have chronic problems, such as physical immobility, unsteady gait, and mental impairments. In such patients, these risks have to be considered and their treatments adapted accordingly. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International in its current issue introduces two original articles on the subject of geriatric medicine. The study reported by Wolfgang von Renteln-Kruse et al. (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 103) investigated the clinical treatment of geriatric patients with cognitive impairment, who require an appropriate environment and appropriate care. ...
DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University study proposes a strategy to better use limited public health care dollars for protecting more people from a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus (HPV) and the cancers it can cause.
Public health programs that devote a portion of their funding to encourage more boys to be vaccinated against HPV -- rather than merely attempting to raise coverage among girls -- may ultimately protect more people for the same price, the study suggests. The findings appear online in the journal Epidemics.
Whether vaccinating boys against ...
A novel therapeutic approach for an existing drug reverses a condition in elderly patients who are at high risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found.
The drug, commonly used to treat epilepsy, calms hyperactivity in the brain of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a clinically recognized condition in which memory impairment is greater than expected for a person's age and which greatly increases risk for Alzheimer's dementia, according to the study published this week in NeuroImage: Clinical.
The ...
WASHINGTON - Both physicians and patients overestimate the risk of heart attack or death for possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) as well as the potential benefit of hospital admission for possible ACS. A survey of patient and physician communication and risk assessment, along with an editorial, were published online last week in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Quantifying Patient-Physician Communication and Perceptions of Risk During Admissions for Possible Acute Coronary Syndromes" and "Lost in Translation: Physician Understanding and Communication of Risk to Patients ...
LSU Professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Ward Plummer and Jiandi Zhang, in collaboration with their colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Beijing, China, have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 112, pg. 2367) titled "Classification of Charge Density Waves based on their Nature." This work is a result of a collaboration funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Charge Density Waves, or CDWs, are observed in many solids, especially in low-dimensional systems. The existence of CDWs was first predicted in the ...
For the first time in the world, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) were able to enroll patients at other hospitals into an acute stroke clinical trial.
The research was published in a recent issue of the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, a publication of the American Neurological Association.
"One of the main drawbacks of conducting clinical trials for stroke is that we traditionally are limited to patients who arrive at large stroke centers that have the expertise to treat stroke quickly to minimize damage ...
Women are more attracted to war heroes than regular soldiers or men who display heroic traits in other fields, such as in sports or natural disaster work, according to new research from the University of Southampton and partners in Europe. The findings also suggest that men did not find heroism to be a sexually attractive trait in women.
In the study, published online in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, 92 women studying in the UK were presented with hypothetical profiles of the opposite sex, representing varying levels of heroism in different contexts such ...
Women who give birth in a public hospital are more confident parents compared to women who have babies privately, a new Australian study has found.
A joint study by Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland, surveyed more than 6400 mums in Queensland, and found women who birth in the public sector were more likely to receive after-hospital health care, in turn boosting their confidence as a new parent, than women in the private system.
Associate Professor Yvette Miller from QUT's Faculty of Health and one of the authors of the study published ...
At the centre of the image is the open star cluster NGC 6193, containing around thirty bright stars and forming the heart of the Ara OB1 association. The two brightest stars are very hot giant stars. Together, they provide the main source of illumination for the nearby emission nebula, the Rim Nebula, or NGC 6188, which is visible to the right of the cluster.
A stellar association is a large grouping of loosely bound stars that have not yet completely drifted away from their initial formation site. OB associations consist largely of very young blue-white stars, which ...
New York University researchers have devised a computer model to explain how a neural circuit learns to classify sensory stimuli into discrete categories, such as "car vs. motorcycle." Their findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, shed new light on the brain processes underpinning judgments we make on a daily basis.
"Categorization is vital for survival, such as distinguishing food from inedible things, as well as for formation of concepts, for instance 'dog vs. cat,' and relationship between concepts, such as hierarchical classification of animals," ...
