HOPES for a treatment that will keep Alzheimer’s disease at bay have been raised by a DNA vaccine that appears to protect and treat mice without any serious side effects.
Alzheimer’s progresses as a small protein called beta-amyloid is overproduced and forms damaging plaques in the brain. There have been high hopes of a vaccination approach – getting the immune system to clean up the plaques – but results till now have been mixed.
In 2002, the pharmaceutical company Elan, based in Dublin, Ireland, halted trials of a vaccine that raised antibodies against beta-amyloid after some patients suffered inflammation of the brain.…
