NIH R01 · 2025
Towards Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease by Targeting Pathogenic Tau and Beta-Amyloid Structures
Project Summary Aim 1 addresses the dearth of drugs for dementia, by structure-based drug design. This approach, so fruitful for treating cancer and HIV-AIDS, is opening for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) because of advances in diffraction and cryoEM. Aggregation of protein Tau is strongly correlated with the onset of dementia. From the recent near-atomic structure of Tau fibrils extracted from the autopsied brain of an Alzheimer’s patient, the drug-binding site (or pharmacophore) has been determined for a fibril-disaggregatng compound. By screening compounds that fit the pharmacophore, new Tau disaggregants have been discovered. These disaggregants dissolve AD-brain Tau fibrils, but do not…
From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.