When will we have effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease ?

Alzheimer's disease is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder (linked to post-transcriptional and post-translational modifications). Apart from "familial" cases (less than 3% of cases), it is not a genetic disease. Onset is often between 75 and 80 years of age. No therapeutic advances have been observed in the last 15 years, despite major research efforts in both the academic and major pharmaceutical sectors. Apart from the launch of memantine in 2003, all clinical trials (413 in total) undertaken between 2002 and 2012 have failed. This 100% failure rate has led many industrial groups to turn away from this devastating disease for patients and their families. The excessive accumulation of redox-active metal ions such as copper in amyloid (polymeric or oligomeric forms) has led to the development of new copper-specific chelators, such as the PA1637 molecule. To avoid the bias brought about by the use of transgenic mice as an animal model for a non-genetic disease, a model of episodic memory loss in normal mice triggered by a single intracerebroventricular injection of _Ab1-42 amyloid oligomers into the hippocampal region of the brain was developed and used to assess the pharmacological activity of these copper-specific chelators (Ceccom et al., Plos One, 2012).