Anti-cancer drug could help treat early-stage Alzheimer’s disease

An international team of scientists led by Stanford University has found that a cancer drug could be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In Spain alone, the disease affects more 700,000 people over 40 years old.

In the brains of those who suffer from it, kynurenine is overactivated. Kynurenine is critical regulator for brain metabolism, which acts on the production lactatenourishing the brain’s neurons, keeping synapses healthy. In tests on mice suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers blocked IDO1 enzymewhich generates kynurenine, which restores the brain metabolism of animals and improves, and in some cases restores, cognitive functions.

For the treatment of many types of cancer, such as melanoma, leukemia and breast cancer, IDO 1 inhibitorswhich can be used in the early stages of neurodegenerative diseases.

“Scientists have focused on the side effects of what we have identified as a problem in brain function.” autonomous“,” explained Praveena Prasad, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the paper published in the journal. Science.

“Hopefully they can be reused”

Current treatments aim to control symptoms and slow their progression, but there is no cure for the disease. fight the onset of the disease“The treatments available today target peptides that are likely the result of a more serious problem that we can treat before those peptides start to form plaques, because if we target brain metabolism, we can not only slow the progression of the disease, but we can also invest in them,” he continued.

Inhibition of the IDO1 enzyme by compounds that have already been tested in human clinical trials against cancer “may represent a a big step forward “in search of ways to protect our brains from damage caused by aging and neurodegeneration,” added Katrin Andreasson, a Stanford professor and lead author.

IDO1 is known in oncology, so there are already drugs in clinical trial to suppress its activity and the production of kynurenine. The researchers managed to avoid the work of identifying new drugs and begin experiments on mice. During them, they were able to verify that the drugs improve glucose metabolism in the hippocampus. performance fixes deficient astrocytes and improved the spatial memory of mice.

“We hope that IDO1 inhibitors developed for cancer treatment can be repurposed for Alzheimer’s disease,” he concluded.