By Sola Ogundipe

A preventive vaccine for dementia may be closer than expected as from 2020 if signals from medical researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine and the University of California, Irvine, UCI, working on US-led research is anything to go by.

Human clinical trials are expected to proceed after successful animal testing to develop effective immunotherapy via a new vaccine to remove ‘brain plaque’ and tau protein aggregates linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Recent success in bigenic mice models support progression to human trials in years to come, the researchers say.

READ ALSO: World Mental Health Day:  It’s dementia, not witchcraft

A new paper in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy paves the way for more work in 2020, with medical researchers at the UCI working with a successful vaccine formulated on adjuvant developed by Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky in South Australia.

The latest research aims to come up with a new treatment to reduce the risk of neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause of age-related dementia, major challenges include the lack of effective treatments, reliable biomarkers, or preventive strategies.

The possible new therapies were tested in bigenic mice. Several promising drug candidates have failed in clinical trials so the search for new preventions or therapies continues.

READ ALSO: Dementia increases 400% in Nigeria in 20 years — REPORT

The new combined vaccination approach could potentially be used to induce strong immune responses to both of the hallmark pathologies of AD in a broad population base of vaccinated subjects with high MHC (major histocompatibility complex) class II gene polymorphisms.

vanguard