UW researchers explore new combination approach to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s

A new study on Alzheimer’s conducted by UW researchers shows that combining current medications with certain natural compounds proves to be safer and more effective against the disease. 

Imprint spoke with Praveen Nekkar Rao, a doctor who specializes in medicinal and bioorganic chemistry, and William LeBoeuf, a second-year master’s student at UW in Nekkar Rao’s lab. 

“[The] interesting thing is [that] we don’t have too many drug markets to treat Alzheimer’s disease,” Nekkar Rao states. Nekkar Rao looked into new classes of drugs that were launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. “For 25 years, not a single new drug was launched for Alzheimer’s disease, but in COVID, they discovered a new class of drugs.” These drugs called monoclonal antibodies were able to bind to toxic Beta-amyloid proteins and helped in preventing disease progression.

 “Until that moment, we only had three drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, and they were only able to show symptomatic relief; they were not able to prevent disease progression or offer any sort of cure,” Nekkar Rao stated.

Although these new class of drugs are being used to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease progression, there are major drawbacks that they must work around: one major side effect on the radar is brain bleeds. “This causes the patients to go in for PETscans, which ends up costing the health care system even more, on top of the drug being very expensive to manufacture,” LeBoeuf said.

Nekkar Rao’s team tackled this problem by demonstrating that toxic side effects of these new class of drugs can be mitigated by combining them with natural compounds resveratrol and curcumin present in natural foods such as red wine and the spice turmeric.

“Our study shows that combination treatment helps to decrease the dose and is more effective in preventing the buildup of toxic protein in the brain,” Nekkar Rao stated.

A study of such magnitude required long hours in the lab, which has grown to be quite familiar with LeBoeuf. “It takes up to at least 24 hours just to collect data… That’s not counting setting up experiments [and] calculating all the values required to add each reagent.” The amount of time put in is nothing short of both physically and mentally draining.

When asked what drives them, LeBoeuf answered, “It’s a lot of hours, but it’s not like clocking into a 9-5, the work we do is very fulfilling when we progress the field forward.” 

Nekkar Rao and LeBoeuf both agreed that the hours put in feel much longer when the result they get isn’t positive. ​

Nekkar Rao showed much appreciation for his work as well as always being interested in learning how the brain and human body function, so it seemed inevitable he would end up in his chosen field. “From my childhood, I had such an interesting experience where my grandmother had Alzheimer’s — I remember times where I would talk to her, and she wouldn’t really respond,” Nekkar Rao stated. 

Nekkar Rao relayed a story of when he was younger, when his father explained to him what his grandmother was going through, Nekkar Rao thought to himself, “Why is this happening?” That was the start of the research journey for Nekkar Rao, since he was fascinated with how the brain functions and works.

The study is in the very early stages of its development, and LeBoeuf stated that one idea moving forward is to design novel compounds that could prove useful to the treatment of Alzheimer’s.