![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/brain_scan.jpg\")
Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are not the same. They affect different regions of the brain and have distinct genetic and environmental risk factors.<\/p>\n
But at the biochemical level, these two neurodegenerative diseases start to look similar<\/strong>. That’s how Emory scientists led by Keqiang Ye, PhD, landed on a potential drug target for Parkinson’s.<\/p>\n In both Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s (PD), a sticky protein forms toxic clumps in brain cells. In AD, the troublemaker inside cells is called tau, making up neurofibrillary tangles. In PD, the sticky protein is alpha-synuclein, forming Lewy bodies.<\/p>\n Ye and his colleagues had previously identified an enzyme (asparagine endopeptidase or AEP) that trims tau in a way that makes it more sticky and toxic<\/strong>. Drugs that inhibit AEP have beneficial effects in Alzheimer’s animal models.<\/p>\n In a new Nature Structural and Molecular Biology<\/em> paper, Emory researchers show that AEP acts in the same way toward alpha-synuclein.<\/p>\n “In Parkinson’s, alpha-synuclein behaves much like Tau in Alzheimer’s,” Ye says. “We reasoned that if AEP cuts Tau, it’s very likely that it will cut alpha-synuclein too.”<\/p>\n A particular chunk of alpha-synuclein produced by AEP’s scissors can be found in samples of brain tissue from patients with PD, but not in control samples, Ye’s team found.<\/p>\n In control brain samples AEP was confined to lysosomes, parts of the cell with a garbage disposal function. But in PD samples, AEP was leaking out of the lysosomes to the rest of the cell.<\/p>\n The researchers also observed that the chunk of alpha-synuclein generated by AEP is more likely to aggregate into clumps than the full length protein, and is more toxic when introduced into cells or mouse brains. In addition, alpha-synuclein mutated so that AEP can’t cut it is less toxic.<\/p>\n Ye cautions that AEP is not the only enzyme that cuts alpha-synuclein into various toxic pieces<\/strong>, and the full-length alpha-synuclein protein is still able to aggregate and cause harm<\/strong>. Nevertheless, he says his team is moving on to testing drugs that inhibit AEP in Parkinson’s animal models.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the\u00a0Emory Health Sciences press release: Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are not the same. They affect different regions of the brain and have distinct genetic and environmental risk factors…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[321,10,6],"tags":[16,195,42,194,93,248],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22272,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250\/revisions\/22272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}