{"id":230647,"date":"2026-02-05T22:15:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T04:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/blocking-ptp1b-protein-may-slow-memory-loss-in-alzheimers"},"modified":"2026-02-05T22:15:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T04:15:23","slug":"blocking-ptp1b-protein-may-slow-memory-loss-in-alzheimers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/blocking-ptp1b-protein-may-slow-memory-loss-in-alzheimers","title":{"rendered":"Blocking PTP1B protein may slow memory loss in Alzheimer\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/blocking-ptp1b-protein-may-slow-memory-loss-in-alzheimers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Alzheimer\u2019s disease is often measured in statistics: millions affected worldwide, cases rising sharply, costs climbing into the trillions. For families, the disease is experienced far more intimately. \u201cIt\u2019s a slow bereavement,\u201d says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Nicholas Tonks, whose mother lived with Alzheimer\u2019s. \u201cYou lose the person piece by piece.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot of discussion about how the neurodegenerative disorder may be caused by a buildup of \u201cplaque\u201d in the brain. When someone refers to this plaque, they\u2019re talking about <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2025-06-alzheimer-disease-therapeutic.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">amyloid-\u03b2<\/a> (A\u03b2), a peptide that occurs naturally but can accumulate and come together. This is known to promote Alzheimer\u2019s disease development.<\/p>\n<p>Now, Tonks, graduate student Yuxin Cen, and postdoctoral fellow Steven Ribeiro Alves have discovered that inhibiting a protein called PTP1B improves learning and memory in an Alzheimer\u2019s disease mouse model. The findings are <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2521944123\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alzheimer\u2019s disease is often measured in statistics: millions affected worldwide, cases rising sharply, costs climbing into the trillions. For families, the disease is experienced far more intimately. \u201cIt\u2019s a slow bereavement,\u201d says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Nicholas Tonks, whose mother lived with Alzheimer\u2019s. \u201cYou lose the person piece by piece.\u201d There\u2019s a lot of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}