The Next Few Years of Research Into Alzheimer's Disease
A conservative view of what lies ahead for Alzheimer's disease (AD) research sees incremental progress resulting from new and better investigative biotechnologies:
In the recently published work "The Biology of Alzheimer Disease" (2012), most of what is known about AD today is described in detail. The book culminates in a chapter called Alzheimer Disease in 2020, where the editors extol "the remarkable advances in unraveling the biological underpinnings of Alzheimer disease...during the last 25 years," and yet also recognize that "we have made only the smallest of dents in the development of truly disease modifying treatments." So what can we reasonably expect over the course of the next 7 years or so? Will we bang our heads against the wall of discovery, or will there be enormous breakthroughs in identification and treatment of AD?Though a definitive diagnosis of AD is only possible upon postmortem histopathological examination of the brain, a thorough review of the book leads me to believe that the greatest progress currently being made is in developing assays to diagnose AD at earlier stages. It is now known that neuropathological changes associated with AD may begin decades before symptoms manifest. This, coupled with the uncertainty inherent in a clinical diagnosis of AD, has driven a search for diagnostic markers. Two particular approaches have shown the most promise: brain imaging and the identification of fluid biomarkers of AD.
The authors anticipate that advances in whole-genome and exome sequencing will lead to a better understanding of all of the genes that contribute to overall genetic risk of AD. Additionally, improved ability to sense and detect the proteins that aggregate in AD and to distinguish these different assembly forms and to correlate the various conformations with cellular, synaptic, and brain network dysfunction should be forthcoming in the next few years. Lastly, we will continue to improve our understanding of the cell biology of neurodegeneration as well as cell-cell interactions and inflammation, providing new insights into what is important and what is not in AD pathogenesis and how it differs across individuals, which will lead, in turn, to improved clinical trials and treatment strategies.
Link: http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2013/08/21/alzheimer-disease-in-2020/
"We can do everything except anything that can actually treat disease." Conservative isn't exactly the right term for the many outlooks of this sort, since the diagnostic and basic science goals are often extremely and even unrealistically ambitious.