How an apolipoprotein E isoform wreaks havoc in the brain, and what we might be able to do about it
BY ROBERT MAHLEY
AND YADONG HUANG
For much of the 20th century, scientists have looked at brain cells from patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), Huntington's disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases and found clumps of material that are largely absent in the brains of nondemented people. The perfectly logical conclusion was that the aggregates were related to the disease process.
The picture is much more complicated than that, however. Various research lines have suggested that protein aggregates may result in deleterious inflammatory responses or that they arise as a response to malfunctioning cell machinery at the root of neurodegeneration. Although questions remain as to their roles in disease, with increasingly sophisticated technology, we have been able to show what these aggregates are made from and increasingly how they form.
Our groups have ...
