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Alzheimer's disease

Vaccine revisited

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 1, page 933 (2002)Cite this article

But two studies in Nature Medicine now reveal that there could still be hope for this strategy. Nitsch and colleagues report that they could detect a positive antibody response in patients who took part in the ill-fated trial. And McLaurin and colleagues show how refining the epitope could eliminate the harmful side effects.

In the first study, the researchers carried out immunohistochemical examinations from a subset of 30 patients who had taken part in the trial — 24 of whom received the vaccine plus booster, whereas the other 6 received placebo.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Hock, C. et al. Generation of antibodies specific for β-amyloid by vaccination of patients with Alzheimer disease. Nature Medicine 2002 Oct 15 (doi: 10.1038/nm783)

  2. Hock, C. et al. Therapeutically effective antibodies against amyloid-β peptide target amyloid-β residues 4–10 and inhibit cytotoxicity and fibrillogenesis. Nature Medicine 2002 Oct 15 (doi: 10.1038/nm790)

FURTHER READING

  1. Birmingham, K. & Frantz, S. Set back to Alzheimer vaccine studies. Nature Med. 8, 199–200 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Schenk, D. Amyloid-β immunotherapy for Alzheimer's disease: the end of the beginning. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 3, 824–828 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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Authors
  1. Simon Frantz
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Frantz, S. Vaccine revisited. Nat Rev Drug Discov 1, 933 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd971

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd971

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