An AP report today indicates that there has been significant progress made in creating a vaccine for Alzheimer’s Disease.
The new vaccine is DNA-based, and if testing continues successfully, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience in Japan hopes to have a vaccine for use in humans in 6 or 7 years. Jonathan has coverage of the nuts and bolts of how the vaccine works over at Nobel Intent, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Elan Pharmaceuticals had been working on an Alzheimer’s vaccine several years ago, but they were forced to halt their work due to brain swelling in some of the test subjects. Yoh Matsumoto, the lead researcher on the project says that these problems have been ironed out based on what his researchers learned from the previous failure.
So far we’ve got cervical cancer vaccines, vaccines for otitis media, and a shingles vaccine. That’s a lot of happenings in a field of medical research that has long lay dormant.
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, vaccines, Alzheimer’s, Elan, biotechnology, biotech[/tags]
Data from the study, the largest of its kind, contradicts some previous studies that found that ibuprofen might exceed others in its class when it comes to preventing this type of dementia. Besides ibuprofen, other types of NSAIDs include naproxen and aspirin.
But the bottom line, the study authors said, is that the findings don’t support the use of NSAIDs to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s, at least not yet anyway.