How do scientists and researchers study diseases and their potential treatments? They start by experimenting on animals such as mice. So far, they have been successful in their objectives except for some cases such as Alzheimer's disease.
This fatal disease, which affects 5 million men and women in the United States alone, continues to puzzle the medical field since scientists could not 100 percent replicate what truly happens in the brain.
However, two scientists are about to change that by understanding the disease outside the animals and right into a 3D culture dish.
In an article published in Time on Tuesday, October 14, researchers from the Mass General Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases of Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Drs Doo Kim and Rudolph Tanzi, were able to develop the Alzheimer's-in-a-dish and even answer the long-age question: what comes first, amyloid deposition or tangles?
When a person has Alzheimer's, he or she developed plaques made of up amyloid and tangles that destroy healthy nerve cells, leaving them either dying or dead. That's some data scientists know after studying corpses. They just don't know which causes what.
Using a 3D culture dish, they conducted an experiment wherein they prevented the development of the amyloid plaque with its known inhibitor. No tangles formed, which then made them conclude that plaques comes first and even causes the tangles to develop.
Further, they are able to study the development in a much shorter time than experiments conducted on mice.
Plaques also come first even if the Alzheimer's disease of a person has a more definitive genetic link.
This model, which has also been used in other types of diseases including atrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease, can be considered a major breakthrough in understanding how Alzheimer's really develop. This can pave the way for a more accurate treatment including drugs that can significantly delay its progress or stop it altogether.
The costs of research are also considerably cheaper than in mice experiment, which may mean cheaper and easily accessible commercial drugs in the future.
The next steps will then be to study the processes that create the link between the plaque and the tangles.