Specialists hope the drug will one day serve to treat human patients

May 14, 2013 06:33 GMT  ·  By

A drug said to slow the progression of Alzheimer's has successfully been tested on mice by a team of researchers working with the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Thus, several older mice displaying Alzheimer's disease symptoms at an advanced stage experienced an improvement in their memory following their being administered this drug throughout the course of three months.

The scientists hope that, once several other investigations are carried out, the drug will become a viable treatment option for human patients.

More so given the fact that, according to these researchers, this drug does more than just slow Alzheimer's. Thus, it is being said that it can also reverse memory deficits.

According to EurekAlert, the drug is named J147.

The researchers who worked on developing it explain that, unlike other drugs currently approved by the FDA and made available to Alzheimer's patients, this one provides more than just short-term benefits.

Study lead author Marguerite Prior, currently working as a research associate in Salk's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, commented on the drug as follows:

“J147 is an exciting new compound because it really has strong potential to be an Alzheimer's disease therapeutic by slowing disease progression and reversing memory deficits following short-term treatment.”

The same source informs us that, in order to create this drug, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies researchers opted for testing several synthetic compounds and checking to see how effective they were in terms of protecting brain cells against aging-related pathologies.

“Our approach is based on the pathologies associated with old age – the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases – rather than only the specificities of the disease,” Marguerite Prior detailed.

Because of this, the researchers suspect that the drug might also serve to treat other neurological disorders.

A detailed account of this research and its findings was published in the journal Alzheimer's Research and Therapy this May 14.