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Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

ucsf.edu

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Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#41

Post by thaumasiotes »

wahern wrote: post #36
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cheesymuffin's comment is downvoted, but I think he's on to something. It would be very odd to consider inflammation of the brain to be a cause of any problem, because inflammation is a symptom of something else.

Inflammation often is directly causative, for example atherosclerosis where the inflammatory response directly results in the buildup of plaques. Inflammation is not typically the root cause, however; something else instigates the inflammation. The distinction matters because the best treatment (greatest efficacy, most cost efficient) may target one or more of the links in the causative chain, but not necessarily the…

Fair enough. Treatment can attack any link in the chain.

Prevention can't, and to me Alzheimer's is something that should be prevented. But we work with what we have.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#42

Post by traek »

cjbprime wrote: post #14

Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…

Sure, but this particular study came out of the lab of the Nobel-prize-winning scientist who literally discovered prions. I think it's at least worthy of discussion.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#43

Post by echelon »

telchar wrote: post #8
viraptor wrote: post #4

Are there any curable prion diseases right now? As far as I can tell from googling, CJD does not have any known cure. If there aren't, does it mean we need to come up with a completely new class of treatments?

Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before th…

Just to provide background, what you describe is nowhere close to feasible. Designing novel proteins is computationally intractable. It took evolution billions of years and parallel optimization to figure out how to problem solve with polypeptides. We're not even at the punch card phase.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#44

Post by JamesBarney »

telchar wrote: post #8
viraptor wrote: post #4

Are there any curable prion diseases right now? As far as I can tell from googling, CJD does not have any known cure. If there aren't, does it mean we need to come up with a completely new class of treatments?

Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before th…

Could we tag them with the immune system?

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#45

Post by echelon »

cheesymuffin wrote: post #9
josephagoss wrote: post #7

Does this mean that inflammation of the brain is to be ruled out as a cause?

What is inflammation?

The immune system kicking into gear.

- vasodilation

- production of cytokines and chemokines

- cell recruitment

- cell proliferation

- upregulation of certain genes

You're kicking your immune system into gear in some shape or form.

Keep in mind the immune system is one of the most complex signalling systems in the body. You can trigger it in different ways and get different responses.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#46

Post by Marsymars »

traek wrote: post #42
cjbprime wrote: post #14

Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…

Sure, but this particular study came out of the lab of the Nobel-prize-winning scientist who literally discovered prions. I think it's at least worthy of discussion.

Prusiner has been on the path to this study for quite a while, at least since a talk of his I attended in 2011.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#47

Post by outlace »

autokad wrote: post #35
outlace wrote: post #28

Taken out of context, the press release makes this finding look a lot more ground-breaking than it is after I quickly read through the actual study. Still a good piece of work though. It was already known, as pointed out in the actual paper, that Amyloid-beta (AB) and Tau, the proteins that have long been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), have prion-like properties which means they exist in an abnormal 3D confi…

could that be interpreted as the ones with trash balls (NFTs) might actually be the ones handling it 'better'?

You mean like the NFTs are somehow protective against the Prion forms? That is a possible interpretation that this study does not directly disambiguate.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#48

Post by 8note »

autokad wrote: post #39
cjbprime wrote: post #14

Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…

one of the authors discovered prions, so I am not so quick to discount their work.

that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though.

we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#49

Post by arcticbull »

traek wrote: post #42
cjbprime wrote: post #14

Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…

Sure, but this particular study came out of the lab of the Nobel-prize-winning scientist who literally discovered prions. I think it's at least worthy of discussion.

You know what they say, when you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail. I’m an armchair physician at best, and I’d say that this doesn’t disprove the viral infection thesis at all. That amyloid and tau act as prions isn’t really relevant if they’re in fact produced initially in response to an infectious agent in an attempt to stop its spread. I’d suggest this is particularly likely to be true as attempts to clear out or suppress the amyloid and tau plaques in fact clear them out with no impact on cognition. This is mentioned in the article itself.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#50

Post by arcticbull »

8note wrote: post #48
autokad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the authors discovered prions, so I am not so quick to discount their work.

that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it

Parent is right this is an appeal to authority. It doesn’t make it more or less right whether a Nobel prize winner comes up with the idea or my mom does, we need to evaluate it on its merits alone. The corollary as I mentioned in a sibling post is that when you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.
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