New therapeutic strategy for Alzheimer’s disease?

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease. Recently, AD has attracted increasing attention for its social harm and high incidence in the elderly population. With the global aging of the population, the development of prevention strategies and effective treatments for AD is considered extremely urgent.

The pathogenesis of AD is complex. The hallmark features of AD are the development of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles formed by β-amyloid (amyloid β, Aβ) deposition. Therefore, inhibition of Aβ-induced mitochondrial damage is considered crucial for reducing the pathological damage in AD.

Neural stem cells (NSCs) are the type of stem cells with self-renewal and neural differentiation capability. This serves as a stem cell pool for biologically replacing damaged nerve tissue.

To date, NSC transplantation methods have achieved good therapeutic effects in basic experiments. Therefore, the use of NSC-CDM to replace the original secretions of these cells has become a new therapeutic strategy that can effectively avoid a number of problems, including ethics issues, transplant cell survival, cell preservation, and transportation. The group of researchers from Shandong University performed the study on this topic.

Their findings published in journal BJBMS demonstrated that NSC-CDM is protective against Aβ_25–35-induced cytotoxicity, thus providing a theoretical basis for the development of novel anti-AD treatments.

Reference:

Jia G, Diao Z, Liu Y, Sun C, Wang C. Neural stem cell-conditioned medium ameliorates Aβ25–35-induced damage in SH-SY5Y cells by protecting mitochondrial function. Bosn J of Basic Med Sci. 2020

Editor: Edna Skopljak