Lebanese Among U.S. Researchers who Found New Drug that May Prevent Brain Damage
A new class of Alzheimer”s disease drugs may prevent long-term damage from traumatic brain injury, according to a study by Georgetown University Medical Center researchers, including a doctor of Lebanese origin.
The drugs — gamma-secretase inhibitors — are designed to target amyloid plaque that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer”s disease.
"No one knows why it occurs, but abnormal amounts of amyloid plaque have been found during an autopsy in about a third of brain injury victims, some of whom were children who would ordinarily never have had these deposits," Mark Burns, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at Georgetown and the study”s lead author, said in a university news release. "Remarkably, these deposits occur in less than one day after injury."
It”s also known that people who”ve suffered a brain injury have a 400 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer”s disease, according to the researchers.
"In this study, we show that the same pathways activated chronically in Alzheimer”s disease are activated acutely in traumatic brain injury and that they appear to play a very important role in secondary injury," Burns said.
He and his colleagues, including Lebanese researcher Charbel al-Hajj Moussa, first conducted tests that showed that brain injury in mice resulted in substantially more amyloid peptide than normal. They then found that amyloid peptide production after brain injury was reduced in mice that received an experimental agent called DAPT, one of the first gamma secretase inhibitors developed and the basis for some Alzheimer”s disease drugs now in clinical trials.
The researchers said that their findings, which are published online in Nature Medicine, suggest that this class of drugs could do something no other drug has been able to do — prevent the long-term and continuing damage that often follows serious brain injury.
Georgetown University Medical Center is an internationally recognized academic medical center with a three-part mission of research, teaching and patient care. The center includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing and Health Studies.