The Alzheimer’s Society has awarded a two year grant worth around £100,000 to researchers from Lancaster and Southampton Universities.

The award has been made to Professor David Allsop and Dr Nigel Fullwood from Lancaster, with Dr Amrit Mudher from Southampton, to develop inhibitors of neurofibrillary tangle formation as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles are characteristic changes found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. A protein called ‘tau’ is involved in making the tangles, which build up inside dying nerve cells.

Professor Allsop said: “Recent brain imaging studies have shown that the appearance of tangles corresponds closely to the time when memory problems arise in this disease. Stopping tangle formation at an early stage could therefore prevent or reduce memory loss.”

The grant proposal builds on the work of PhD student Anthony Aggidis at Lancaster who devised an inhibitor based on a modified version of a small region of the tau molecule that is responsible for its aggregation into tangles. This novel inhibitor can also cross the blood-brain barrier and enter into nerve cells.

In preliminary experiments, Anthony fed this inhibitor to fruit flies engineered to produce a toxic form of human tau in their eyes. Encouragingly, the inhibitor reduced degeneration of the eyes seen in this model system.

The grant will allow Anthony to carry out extensive studies into the effects of the inhibitor in this and other fruit fly models, and in various other experimental systems, and to find out exactly how the inhibitor interacts with the tau molecule to block tangle formation.

Professor Allsop said: “All of these studies, alongside complementary studies carried out by other members of our research team at Lancaster, will help us to decide if the inhibitor is suitable as a drug candidate for future human use.”