Pan-European consortium to tackle Alzheimer’s disease

A healthy neuron. Image courtesy of the Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center, a service of US NIH’s National Institute on Aging.

Memosad has been awarded a three-year, €3 million grant by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). The consortium has been brought together, and will be coordinated by, VERUM, the Foundation for Behaviour and Environment, a non-profit organisation based in Munich, Germany. The aim is to combine scattered European resources and increase European competitiveness in this area of research.

The consortium consists of Europe’s leading research centres in basic neuroscience, with three from Germany, two from Belgium, one from France, one from Ireland, and one from Spain. It also includes UK biotechnology company Senexis Ltd, which will help in drug development.

A hallmark of Alzheimer’s is the deposition of protein aggregates in the brain consisting of Abeta, which forms plaques outside the neurons, and Tau, which generates tangles inside the neurons.

Several lines of evidence suggest that the impairment of memory in the early stage of the disease can be caused by tiny protein assemblies, even before they aggregate into fibres. The Abeta and Tau species that cause synaptic dysfunction, their mechanism of toxicity, and the link between both pathologies remains largely unknown, although recent research suggests that Abeta accumulation triggers Tau pathology.

Unravelling the pathways that lead from Abeta through Tau is expected to throw up novel drug targets. The aim of the Memosad is to validate three or four therapeutic targets and discover at least two compounds with efficacy preclinical in animal models.