Cancer Drugs Reverse Memory Loss in Alzheimer’s Disease

GEN | News Highlights:Cancer Drugs Reverse Memory Loss in Alzheimer’s Disease: Scientists have made the unexpected discovery that two marketed anticancer drugs can dramatically restore memory in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and may feasibly help hold back or even reverse memory loss in human AD patients.
The discovery, by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (China), was based on studies in a fruit fly model of AD that expresses Aβ42. Yi Zhong, Ph.D., and colleagues found that Aβ42 directly activates EGFR in the brain, and that treating the AD model fruit flies with either of the EGFR inhibitors gefitinib or erlotinib reversed the memory loss that is characteristic of their AD phenotype.