Science Outreach

As a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease inches ever closer, clinical experience shows that early interventions will be crucial, and single pharmaceutical agents are unlikely to correct progressive dementia that is the product of decades of pathologic transformations in the making. Our focus is on investigating disease progression in the form of currently undruggable protein tangles of tau that are found inside Alzheimer’s brain cells, which spread like a cascade of falling dominos once they are formed—that is, protein tangles will continue to progress unabated unless added therapies are made to stop them. Our work will change the field of Alzheimer’s Disease by creating a blueprint detailing the features of effective medicines that halt the domino-like spreading of protein tangles, thereby offering promise to millions who await combination therapies to eliminate the fate of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Monotherapies that target Aβ plaques are the first piece of the puzzle in assembling effective Alzheimer's therapies. To explain our thinking about how they work and what else is needed for effective Alzheimer's therapies, we sketched the infographics below.