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Science can be as brutal as your average blood sport. Take Alzheimer's research, for example. For years, advocates of the theory that the disease is caused by too much of a toxic protein called beta amyloid (aka "the baptists") have been duking it out with proponents of the theory that it's caused by too much tau protein (aka "the tauists"). Beta amyloid is what makes the plaques that clump in an Alzheimer's brain. Tau forms the ropey, intracellular tangles that are also typical of a person with AD. For years the Baptists have been ascendant; they've also received the bulk of the research money, a fact that has not been lost on the Tauists, who have claimed, among other things, that because they don't subscribe to the dominant paradigm they've been shut out of grant money, academic positions, respect.
One manifestation of this divide is that many of the new drugs that are in the end stages of development work off the amyloid hypothesis in one way or another. This was a bad month for a number of those drugs: Flurizan flamed out, the Elan "vaccine," while removing plaques, did not improve cognition or slow down cell death for most people; and now a drug in development by Elan and Wyeth not only hasn't shown efficacy in early trials, it has led to brain inflammation in a number of participants, callling into question its overall safety. If you were listening closely, you might have heard the Tauists snickering.
On Wednesday, though, when the results of a preliminary trial of a drug called Rember were announced, you didn't have to listen closely--they were shouting.
Rember is the first drug that attacks the tau protein. Tau forms its tangles inside cells, where it was thought to be difficult, if not impossible, to reach. Oddly--or serendipitously--the drug Rember, which in another incarnation is commonly used as a blue dye in laboratory experiments--was found to attack tau quite by accident when a drop happened to land in a test tube of tau, and the tau disappeared.
According to researchers, in a trial of 321 people with mild to moderate AD, those taking Rember showed "an 81% difference in the rate" of cognitive decline than those not on the drug.
If this pans out, it will be huge, in all sorts of ways. One scientific paradigm will best another. Money will flow into tau research. More tau drugs will come down the pipeline. But first things first. A much larger, more comprehensive clinical trial, this one to parse the drug's efficacy is needed. According to the company funding the research, TauRX, that trial will begin next year. Before that can happen, though,TauRX will have to fix their server: it was overwhelmed as soon as the preliminary results were announced, by people wanting to sign up to participate.
