In The News: Department of Brain Health

The Week

A new drug shows promising results in trials, but questions remain about whether benefits outweigh side effects.

Scientific American

Findings suggest that the amyloid-targeting drug candidate slows cognitive decline in some people, but questions remain over its potential side effects

Being Patient

One of a few kinds of gut bacteria singled out by scientists in a recent study appears to be associated with an 18-percent-higher chance of getting Alzheimer's disease.

Fox News

Former Coca-Cola consultant discusses a study linking Alzheimer's disease to gut bacteria and how what you eat can impact your brain health.

Medical Xpress

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, researchers have identified a correlation between Alzheimer's disease and specific gut microbiota populations. In a paper published in Scientific Reports titled "Genetic correlations between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiome genera," the researchers explain how they narrowed the search down to a half dozen disease-correlated microbes, with one related to the most significant risk.

Science Alert

Tensions between the brain, the gut, and the makeup of its microbial inhabitants appear to play a critical role in the development of neurodegenerative conditions.

Drug Discovery News

In July 2022, a bombshell dropped on the Alzheimer's disease research field. For years, researchers had searched for something that caused the disease’s telltale amyloid plaques — complex tangles of a protein called amyloid-beta (Aβ) frequently found in the brains of patients with neurodegenerative disorders. A series of studies published starting in the mid-2000s reported the discovery of a toxic form of Aβ in the brains of mouse models of Alzheimer's disease called Aβ*56. Researchers hoped that Aβ*56 was the protein that snowballed into those amyloid plaques. But a team of sleuths found that many of the papers describing Aβ*56 were fraudulent and contained an array of faked images and blots. The fraud seemed to call the entire idea of amyloids causing Alzheimer’s disease into question.

Las Vegas Review Journal

A musical superstar has recruited a UNLV student for her effort to improve young people’s mental health. The Born This Way Foundation, co-founded in 2012 by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, announced its new group of 31 advisory board members Tuesday, including Faria Tavacoli, a 20-year-old sophomore majoring in public health and minoring in neuroscience at UNLV.

United Press International

Predicting when new drugs come to market in the United States has never been an exact science, and it has become even harder since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts told UPI. But some drugs on the horizon have the potential to make a major impact.

Alzheimer's News Today

AB Science is initiating a Phase 3 trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of its candidate therapy masitinib in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

Streetwise Reports

Biopharmaceutical company Axsome Therapeutics Inc. (AXSM:NASDAQ), which is focused on developing new medicines for use in the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders, today announced that "AXS-05, a novel, oral, investigational NMDA receptor antagonist with multimodal activity, met the primary and key secondary endpoints in the ACCORD (Assessing Clinical Outcomes in Alzheimer's Disease Agitation) Phase 3 trial, by substantially and statistically significantly delaying the time to relapse and preventing relapse of agitation in patients with Alzheimer's disease, as compared to placebo."

Neurology Live

Newly announced findings from the phase 3 ACCORD trial (NCT04797715) showed that AXS-05 (Axsome Therapeutics), a novel, investigational n-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, met its primary end point of statistically significant delay in time to relapse and preventing relapse of agitation in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) agitation.1