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Alzheimer’S Disease: Fundamental Research Paves The Way For Therapeutics.

Alzheimer’s disease: fundamental research paves the way for therapeutics.

Introduction: biotechnology’s ambitious goals

Until recently, the discovery of a successful drug wasn’t actually the logical end point of the elucidation of a disease process. Rather, it was dependent on major doses of luck and coincidences. One speaks of ‘serendipity’: ‘the effect by which you accidentally discover something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely’. A world-famous example is Fleming’s discovery of penicillin as a treatment for infectious diseases. Upon returning from a holiday, he realised he had not cleaned up his bacterial plates before leaving. When he took them out, he noticed a strange thing: fungus had grown on the plates and killed all the bacteria in its vicinity. Fleming deduced that the fungus produced an ‘antibiotic’ substance and went on to isolate it.
Modern biotechnology asks for a more rationalistic approach: the development of a drug should be explicitly based on a thorough understanding of the molecular mechanisms that cause a specific disease. The billions of dollars and euros that annually flow into pharmaceutically oriented biotechnological research can only be justified if this rationalistic approach bears fruit. Using recent developments in fundamental research on Alzheimer’s disease as an example, we will evaluate whether biotechnology lives up to its promises.

Alzheimer’s disease: a two-level definition

Without doubt, Alzheimer’s disease is one of the major medical challenges of our time. So far, there is no medication that significantly alters the course of the disease. Its incidence is rising rapidly in all developed countries because of the disproportional increase of the aging population. Belgium alone contains 70,000 Alzheimer’s patients; in the United States there are 4 million of them. Taking care of Alzheimer patients is not only a major burden for the relatives, it also forms an enormous socio-economic...