Read the latest from the Abisambra group

By Danielle Houghton

Associate professor, Jose Abisambra, Ph. D., and team researches how broad kinase inhibition mitigates early neuronal dysfunction in tauopathy.

The study provided the identification of four new potential therapeutic targets that could halt or even reverse Alzheimer’s disease progression. Having these four new targets will allow for further exploration for therapeutic interventions.

“There is hope,” says Abisambra. “As new technology advances into the forefront of scientific research, we can use these tools to identify targets and develop interventions for incurable disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

Abisambra describes the study as “the emblematic of the successful partnership between academia and pharma,” explaining it has “extended its results into an unexpected list of potential targets.”

Abisambra focuses primarily on neurodegenerative diseases that share a common pathological hallmark: abnormal aggregation of the protein tau.

abisambrapic
A new drug, four new targets: Initial experiments with a kinase inhibitor restores brain function as evidenced by a new adaptation of Manganese-Enhanced MRI. As expected, the drug had no differential effect In non-transgenic normal control mice (Non). However, the damaging consequences of Alzheimer’s-like tau pathology (C) was rescued back to normal in transgenic mice (Tg; D) compared to vehicle-treated controls (C).

Read more in PubMed.