The challenge is huge: There’s a lot we don’t understand about Alzheimer’s disease, but we do know that patient’s brains tend to accumulate toxic tau and amyloid-beta proteins, so most research has focused on those targets.
That approach has led to new drugs that can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s to a small degree, but we’ve yet to find anything that can reverse the damage the disease does to the brain.
The big idea: Synapses — the connections between brain neurons — need a protein called “KIBRA” in order to form memories, and there’s a link between certain variants of the KIBRA gene and developing Alzheimer’s.
