Drug design could lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease
An international team of scientists and pharmaceutical collaborators have made a breakthrough ‘bench to bedside’ discovery, ten years in the making, which they hope will advance the future treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in patients.
The research, conducted by the University of Glasgow and the biotechnology company Sosei Heptares Ltd, describes for the first time the process of designing a new molecule to selectively target a specific receptor protein in the brain and demonstrates, through laboratory preclinical and human clinical studies, the potential of this approach to create superior new drugs to improve cognitive function in Alzheimer’s disease patients.
There are currently no drugs that can stop or slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. However, there are drugs that work to recover memory loss and improve cognitive function in early dementia, but these drugs are often not very effective, and are associated with side effects that may limit their effectiveness in clinical practice.
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Professor Andrew Tobin’s work, based at the Centre for Translational Pharmacology at the University’s Institute of Molecular, Cell & Systems Biology, is supported by a £4.2m Wellcome Collaborative Award, funding awarded in 2016, in collaboration with researchers at Monash University in Melbourne Australia (Professors Arthur Christopoulos and Patrick Sexton), to use state-of-the-art technologies and approaches to discover new ways to make better drugs for neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.