Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and many other devastating neurodegenerative diseases have something in common besides causing great suffering and death – they are all characterized by proteins (different ones for each disease) aggregating in neurons within the brain and nervous system. Now, scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have found that the cells have the mechanisms to clear those aggregates – they just fail to activate them. Aggregates form when certain proteins form incorrectly. Instead of performing the function they were supposed to perform, they attach to each other, creating sizeable clusters that not only are useless but also disrupt the cells’ normal functionality. The tools to cure the disease are already within us, encoded by our own DNA, the Haifa researchers discovered. “The cell needs to realize there is a problem, and then it needs to know which out of the many tools available to it, it should use to solve the problem.” Unfortunately, the group found, this is where the bottleneck lies. The good news is that since the ability is there, we hope future treatments can be developed to activate it and employ the body’s own tools to cure these debilitating neurodegenerative diseases.”
