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Finding Suggests New Aim for Alzheimer's Drugs
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In a year when news about Alzheimer's disease seems to whipsaw between encouraging and disheartening, a new discovery by an 84-year-old scientist has illuminated a new direction.
The scientist, Paul Greengard, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on signaling in brain cells, still works in his Rockefeller University laboratory in New York City seven days a week, walking there from his apartment two blocks away, taking his aging Bernese mountain dog, Alpha.
He got interested in Alzheimer's about 25 years ago when his wife's father developed it, and his research is now supported by a philanthropic foundation that was started solely to allow him to study the disease. It was mostly these funds and federal government grants that allowed him to find a new protein that is needed to make beta amyloid, which makes up the telltale plaque that builds up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's.
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