New Mouse Model an Important Advance for Testing Treatments

Alzheimer's Association
Thursday, 3 October 1996

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created an important new research tool for studying drug treatments for Alzheimer's disease, the degenerative brain disorder that affects more than 4 million Americans, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

Karen Hsiao, M.D., Ph.D., and her colleagues have genetically engineered a mouse model that demonstrates, for the first time, both behavioral symptoms and brain cell damage characteristic of Alzheimer's disease.

"This animal model will be tremendously useful to test possible drug therapies, and hypotheses about the causes of Alzheimer's," said Zaven Khachaturian, Ph.D., director of the Association's Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute. "With it, we can study the effects of drugs on behavioral and biochemical aspects of the disease."

"People want treatments for Alzheimer's that have an impact on the behaviors of people with the disease, not just their brain chemistry," Khachaturian said. "For instance, caregivers want their loved ones to retain their functional abilities as long as possible, to be more like they were before they got Alzheimer's. This mouse model should help us find those therapies."

In laboratory tests, Hsiao's mice showed behaviors consistent with impaired learning ability and memory. They also developed the lesions, known as amyloid plaques, found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. A previously announced mouse model for Alzheimer's reproduced the plaques, but not the decline in memory or thinking ability.

"This model is particularly relevant to the way the disease affects humans," Khachaturian said. "It may, therefore, reduce the time and cost involved in finding therapies for Alzheimer's disease." "Correlative Memory Deficits, Ab Elevation, and Amyloid Plaques in Transgenic Mice," by Hsiao and her colleagues, is published in the October 4, 1996 issue of Science.

For more information, or to contact Alzheimer's Association, see their website at: www.alz.org