S cientists have claimed an important breakthrough in the battle against Alzheimer’s after neutralising the most significant gene responsible for the disease for the first time.

A team in California successfully identified the protein associated with the high-risk apoE4 gene and then manage to prevent it damaging human neuron cells.

The study could open the door to a potential new drug capable of halting the disease, however the researchers have urged caution because so far their compound has only been tried on collections of cells in a laboratory.

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Will open avenues for drug discovery

Scientists have developed a new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease that can detect early indicators of the disease long before the first symptoms appear in patients. The blood test would thus open the door to new avenues in drug discovery, said the researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

The blood test uses a technology called immuno-infrared sensor to measure distribution of pathological and healthy structures of amyloid-beta, according to a study published in the Molecular Cell. The pathological amyloid-beta structure is rich in a sticky, sheet-like folding pattern that makes it prone to aggregation, while the healthy structure is not.

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