Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Lund University in Lund, Sweden, have identified a form of tau that could serve as a marker to track Alzheimer’s progression. The marker also could be used by Alzheimer’s drug developers to assess whether investigational tau-based drugs – the next frontier in Alzheimer’s drug development – are effective against the disease. Such drugs theoretically would benefit people in later stages of the disease, when tau tangles play a crucial role.
By studying 667 people in Sweden and the U.S. at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers discovered in the cerebrospinal fluid that levels of a specific form of tau — known as microtubule binding region (MTBR)-tau243 — track with the amount of damaging tau tangles in the brain and with the degree of cognitive decline.
The findings, published July 13 in Nature Medicine, are a major step toward a better approach to diagnosing and staging Alzheimer’s disease. A test based on MTBR-tau243 could speed up drug development by providing a relatively simple and inexpensive way to identify and monitor participants in clinical trials and assess whether the experimental therapies, including tau-based drugs, can change the course of the disease.
