Scientists believe that the underlying cause of many neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, is the buildup of misfolded protein clusters in the brain. A new antibody treatment developed by a team at the NYU School of Medicine has the potential to target a feature of these misfolded proteins shared by several different diseases, promising a possible single treatment for a variety of neurological disorders.
A number of different avenues are being researched around the world to try to figure a way to halt the process of protein misfolding, but no approach has proven effective yet. One of the challenges facing scientists is that any treatment needs to be able to distinguish when a protein is misfolding and when it is simply folding into a safe regular shape.
Each individual misfolded protein is made up of repeating structural units called monomers. As these monomers initially form larger clusters they are referred to as oligomers and in their final stage they become fibrils, clusters of thousands of monomers that ultimately snowball, and cause the negative effects seen in a given neurological disease.
The newly developed antibody is designed to target these clusters when they are at the stage of oligomer, before they cluster into a fibril size. While these toxic oligomers can be comprised of different types of proteins they all are dominated by the same “beta-sheet” amino acid structure. This means that while different misfolded protein clusters can cause different diseases, they all can be targeted by a single treatment that focuses on that particular beta-sheet structure.