Protein that regulates brain cell connections could be new target for treating Alzheimer's disease
"Ephexin5 is a tantalizing pharmaceutical target because in otherwise healthy adults, there's very little present in the brain," says Gabrielle L. Sell, a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "That means shutting off Ephexin5 should carry very few side effects," adds Sell, who works with Seth S. Margolis, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological chemistry and neuroscience. Their work with Ephexin5 grew out of a paradox about one of Alzheimer's disease's defining features, the development of thick plaques in the brain composed of a protein called amyloid beta. Stemming the production of this protein is currently the major focus of efforts to develop new Alzheimer's treatments, explain Sell and Margolis, but it isn't the amount of amyloid beta in patients' brains that correlates best with the severity of symptoms; rather, it's the loss of so-called excitatory synapses, a type of cellular structure forg...