Researchers at Columbia working to pinpoint where Alzheimer's begins and how it progresses
NEW YORK (WABC) -- Scientists understand a lot about what Alzheimer's looks like in the brain, but they don't fully understand what starts and drives the disease.
Doctors at the Alzheimer's Research Center at Columbia are pinpointing where the disease begins and how it progresses.
Imagine a raging fire that destroys a home. Investigators are searching for the cause, but there is so much debris to sift through. Well, it turns out, diseases can also be kind of like a raging fire with a kind of debris to sift through.
"Alzheimer's is a very slowly progressive disorder," Director of Columbia's Alzheimer's Research Center Dr. Scott Small said. "And by the time we typically get to see the brain, it's hard to really piece together and isolate the key source."
Small is the Alzheimer's equivalent to a fire investigator. He and his team are doing groundbreaking work and trying to isolate what causes Alzheimer's.
"This organelle is called the endosome, think of the cell as a complex train track system and this is Grand Central Station and that is the organelle defective first and foremost in Alzheimer's," Small said.
Following along with Small's analogy, there are tens of millions of cells, or tiny Grand Central Stations, inside the brain.
Moving in and out of these cells are organelles, or trains, that help people think, move, and feel emotions.
Small has pinpointed, what for this analogy, is the train that is a problem in Alzheimer's patients.
"When this breaks, the bubble bursts and the Nano shuttle breaks down, you get complete traffic jams in Grand Central Station," Small said.
But can you ever fix that? Small says yes, they have the drugs.
"Not in human trials, but that's exactly what we're doing," Small said. "We are developing drugs to fix that."
That brings us to Small's colleague, Dr. Yasir Qureshi, who works with the brains of both mice and post-mortem Alzheimer's patients -- analyzing similar abnormalities.
"We can design questions based on the mouse studies and then we can test them in those human brains, similar sections from similar areas that are representative," Qureshi said. "And if whatever we found in mice, does it translate to humans."
Replicating is one thing, reversing, or as Qureshi says, "rescuing," is quite another.
"We were able to see that after expression, we were able to rescue this type of processes present in the normal self," Qureshi said.
This gave Qureshi the idea that if you could do it with mice, you could do it with people.
"The next steps are if this works, we'll do many more studies in academia first and then collaboration with industry to see if this can actually be developed into a drug," Qureshi said.
Taken altogether, it is this research that has Dr. Small convinced we are standing near the brink of a breakthrough.
"The home run will be hit, I'm sure of it," Small said. "It may be two years, it may be five years but we're on the cusp."
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