Science News

In two studies receiving international attention, 2013-16 BrightFocus grantee Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD, of Vrije Universiteit (VU) Medical Center, Amsterdam, and colleagues in the Netherlands have lent confidence to our understanding of how Alzheimer’s develops. Their findings help confirm that amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide levels start to build up and aggregate long before Alzheimer’s symptoms develop, and are predictive of disease.

Read about the success from an early clinical trial of the Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab.

After years spent researching a protein linked to inherited forms of glaucoma, Raquel Lieberman, PhD, and her team at Georgia Tech have provided a three-dimensional view of that protein and a better understanding of what can happen when it becomes misshapen through genetic miscoding.

Good news from Yale—researchers there report early success using a still-experimental cancer drug known as saracatinib to treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

BrightFocus 2013-14 grantee Crystal Miller, PhD, and her mentor, Bruce Lamb, PhD, both of the Cleveland Clinic, along with Taylor Jay of Case Western Reserve University, are coauthors on a new report that describes the surprising—even counterintuitive--role that a genetic variant associated with the immune system plays in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

The 2015 Academy Awards telecast shed a light on the diseases BrightFocus is battling—Alzheimer's disease and the vision diseases associated with aging that altogether affect tens of millions of Americans.