- Our Story - In Memory A Vaccine for Alzheimer's Disease? A
brief summary of important potential treatments and CAF’s
related research. There has been a lot of attention over the
last several years about vaccines and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
The buildup of a protein in the brain, that our body normally
produces, called “amyloid-beta” plays an important role in AD.
The accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain leads to ongoing
nerve cell injury and this ultimately contributes to the
cognitive decline we see in patients. It has been theorized that
if one could prevent the buildup in the brain of amyloid-beta or
could clear away what does build up, this could serve a
treatment. In 1999, it was shown that if mice that develop
amyloid buildup in the brain were actively immunized with the
amyloid-beta protein itself (amyloid-beta was injected under the
skin of mice), they developed antibodies against amyloid-beta
and had much less buildup in their brain. It was later shown,
that if one directly infused antibodies