Anne Trafton, MIT News Office March 1, 2012 Li-Huei Tsai, leader of the research team studying brain functioning, learning, and memory says that the protein HDAC2 contributes to inhibiting them in Alzheimer's patients.
She says that blocking this inhibitor from working could help achieve the goal of restoring learning and memory.
It could likely take 5 to 10 years to develop and test such drugs.
“I would really strongly advocate for an active program to develop agents that can contain HDAC2 activity,” says Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “The disease is so devastating and affects so many people, so I would encourage more people to think about this.”
Tsai and her colleagues report the findings of this early study on mice in the Feb. 29 online edition of Nature. Lead author of the paper is Johannes Gräff, a postdoc at the Picower Institute.
SOURCES: Johannes Graff, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; Brad Dickerson, M.D., associate professor, neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Feb. 29, 2012, Nature.
She says that blocking this inhibitor from working could help achieve the goal of restoring learning and memory.
It could likely take 5 to 10 years to develop and test such drugs.
“I would really strongly advocate for an active program to develop agents that can contain HDAC2 activity,” says Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “The disease is so devastating and affects so many people, so I would encourage more people to think about this.”
Tsai and her colleagues report the findings of this early study on mice in the Feb. 29 online edition of Nature. Lead author of the paper is Johannes Gräff, a postdoc at the Picower Institute.
SOURCES: Johannes Graff, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; Brad Dickerson, M.D., associate professor, neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Feb. 29, 2012, Nature.