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Tau Shows Promise as Achilles’ Heel for Alzheimer’s and Similar Diseases

Alzheimer’s disease has long been characterized primarily by the buildup of two proteins in the brain: beta-amyloid and tau. Decades of focus on beta-amyloid has failed to significantly help patients. So researchers are turning more attention to the second member of the duo.

“Amyloid hasn’t been as successful as we hoped,” says Jang-Ho Cha, an executive overseeing translational medicine work at pharmaceutical giant Novartis. “Tau has really emerged as a [potentially] more relevant target.”

Tau was long thought to be a secondary actor. Amyloid plaque builds up first, largely outside of neurons, followed by tau tangles—filaments of the tau protein—which clog their insides.…

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 Protein tangles in Alzheimer's patients could help predict brain shrinkage

Research suggests tangles of tau could be used to predict how much shrinkage will occur and where

Articles of Interest

Alzheimer ‘Tau’ Protein Far Surpasses Amyloid in Predicting Toll on Brain Tissue

Brain imaging of pathological tau-protein “tangles” reliably predicts the location of future brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s patients a year or more in advance, according to a new study by scientists at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center. In contrast, the location of amyloid “plaques,” which have been the focus of Alzheimer’s research and drug development for decades, was found to be of little utility in predicting how damage would unfold as the disease progressed.

New Clues to Target Alzheimer’s Found in Proteins

Studies have shown that brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s worsen as increasingly large amounts of proteins in the brain become misfolded and start clumping together. In developing new treatments for these progressive brain diseases, the focus has long been on distinct proteins, including those named amyloid and tau for Alzheimer’s.

Roles of tau protein in health and disease

Tau is well established as a microtubule-associated protein in neurons. However, under pathological conditions, aberrant assembly of tau into insoluble aggregates is accompanied by synaptic dysfunction and neural cell death in a range of neurodegenerative disorders, collectively referred to as tauopathies.

What's the Meaning of Tau in Alzheimer's Disease?

Brains of people with Alzheimer's disease contain clumps of a sticky substance known as amyloid and tangled strands of another protein formed when neurons die, called tau.

Resources

Tau protein—not amyloid—may be key driver of Alzheimer’s symptoms

One of the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is sticky plaques of ß-amyloid protein, which form around neurons and are thought by a large number of scientists to bog down information processing and kill cells. For more than a decade, however, other researchers have fingered a second protein called tau, found inside brain cells, as a possible culprit.