A bit of a surprise to
discover that the protein drivers for these diseases can be identified and
presumably targeted for therapeutic treatment with laser light. A cannot guess at this point what such a
treatment might look like but the door is now open.
There are few diseases
more disabilitating or more tragic to work around. For everyone it is all hopeless and at best
you are living with a death sentence that takes several years to execute.
Let us hope this leads
somewhere.
Discovery shines a
light on potential cure for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
November
4, 2013
According
to researchers, a multi-photon laser technique can be used to detect protein
aggregates that cause Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
It
is generally believed that aggregations of proteins are responsible for brain
disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
However, the difficulty has been in detecting the aggregates responsible and
removing them from the brain. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology
in Sweden and Polish Wroclaw University of Technology have found a potential
solution using lasers.
Alzheimer's,
Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are thought to be caused by
aggregates of amyloid beta protein that start to inhibit proper cellular
processes in the brain. Although it is technically possible to cure the
diseases by detecting and removing the amyloid protein aggregates using
chemicals, these chemicals are highly toxic and harmful to the patient.
The
researchers discovered that by using a multi-photon laser technique, it is
possible to distinguish between well-functioning proteins and the protein
aggregates. The researchers are hopeful that once the malfunctioning proteins
are detected, they can be removed using photo acoustic therapy, which is
currently used in tomography.
Although
different proteins create different kinds of amyloids, they generally have the
same structure, which the researchers say is what makes it possible to
differentiate them from healthy proteins using the multi-photon laser
technique.
“Nobody
has talked about using only light to treat these diseases until now," says
Piotr Hanczyc at Chalmers University of Technology. "This is a totally new
approach and we believe that this might become a breakthrough in the research
of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. We
have found a totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser
light.”
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