Researchers have developed a novel compound that could transform the way we treat Alzheimer’s disease, offering not just a new weapon but potentially a new strategy for battling the most common form of dementia worldwide.

While current drugs for Alzheimer’s mostly focus on removing amyloid-beta plaques associated with the disease, the new compound takes a fundamentally different approach, instead targeting a specific enzyme to therapeutically reprogram the epigenome of neurons – a series of molecular marks that can be added to or removed from DNA, to change the way genes work.

Monoclonal antibody drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab, which target amyloid-beta proteins, help somewhat to slow the progression of the disease when treatment is started early, but there is still no proven way to reverse cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s in humans.