Ana de Barros, PhD, managing science editor —

The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) has awarded Italian biotechnology company Axxam SpA a $340,485 grant to support the development of novel medication for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The company is exploring drugs based on small molecules with the ability to target inflammation directly. It is the…

The head of the Division of Memory Disorders of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), neurologist David Geldmacher, M.D. recently created the UAB Alzheimer’s Risk Assessment and Intervention Clinic, which is the first of its kind in the country. With the main purpose of helping not…

Eli Lilly and Company and AstraZeneca, who previously partnered to study an investigational treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, have announced the enrollment of the first patient in the study, called AMARANTH. The Phase II/III study aims to evaluate the safety and efficacy of oral beta secretase cleaving…

A recent study published in the journal eLife suggests that it might be possible to restore lost memories. Over the past century, evidence suggested that long-term memories are expressed in the brain by changes in synaptic connections, which are destroyed in neurodegenerative disorders. However, in a recent news…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Arjuna Natural Extracts Ltd. a U.S. patent for the company’s turmeric extract formulation, BCM-95 Curcumin, which is expected to become a treatment for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The patent number 8859020 describes the drugs’s combination of beneficial curcuminoids and turmeric…

A Stanford University School of Medicine study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, entitled “Prostaglandin signaling suppresses beneficial microglial function in Alzheimer’s disease models,” indicate that microglia impairment may be under the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. The cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is…

A study entitled “Enhancing dentate gyrus function with dietary flavanols improves cognition in older adults,” published this month in Nature Neuroscience, found that a cocoa flavanol containing diet ameliorates cognitive function in older people. The dentate gyrus (DG) is a region in the hippocampal formation whose function…

A drug that is usually used for treatment of psoriasis has been found to stimulate the activity of the enzyme ADAM10 in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients (AD), providing encouraging results for treating the disease. The study, which was recently published in the journal Neurology, entitled “…

A new study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests a potential therapy for a type of neurotransmitter receptor for Frontotemporal Dementia. The study entitled ”Tau-Mediated NMDA Receptor Impairment Underlies Dysfunction of a Selectively Vulnerable Network in a Mouse Model of Frontotemporal Dementia,” was…

According to the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), a nonprofit organization that specializes in biomedical research and information dissemination on the health benefits of coffee, people who drink about 3 to 5 cups of coffee per day may be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease.