Found Drug Growers of new cells in the brain

Quoted from Liputan6.com, - Researchers have found a drug that helps the brain re-grow new cells and improve the experimental Alzheimer's drug, he said, Reuters reported.

Researchers, using the mouse test, based the findings of mammals, including humans, making the young brain cells throughout their lives. Most of the dead, but this drug has helped more than infant cells survive and grow into functioning brain cells.

"We make new neurons in our brain every day," said Andrew Pieper from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas who worked on this study, in a telephone interview. "What we do in research, allowing more of them survive." Today, the compound was called P7C3, and researchers have begun studying it to be more effective. They say it seems safe and even when working with drug taking.

This compound is similar to Medivation Inc. and Pfizer Inc. Alzheimer's experimental drug, Dimebon, and may provide ways to enhance the effect, Pieper and colleagues report in the journal Cell.

Alzheimer's gradually destroys the brain and affects 26 million people around the world. Drugs, such as Pfizer's Aricept, improve symptoms only slightly. The researchers examined the 1000 representatives from 300 thousand chemical compounds are collected and given to the rats. They then dissect the brain to see if the rats have made one new cells in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and memory.

They finally narrowed the field to P7C3. When they gave it to old rats for two months, older rats was significantly better than other old rats in the way they learn in the vicinity of water of confusion. When dissected, these mice were found to have three times the number of new neurons are born normal in the area called the dentate gyrus of the brain.

They create derivative P7C3 called A20 that works better. When the researchers tested Dimebon and Serono compounds, they found these drugs also stimulate the growth of new brain cells. Able to provide drug effects and lead to better performance for treating Alzheimer's and other diseases that may destroy brain cells such as stroke and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.

"This striking demonstration of treatment originating from cognitive decline associated with age of animal life and ways to develop the potential of the first drug that discusses the core processes in Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped to finance for research. (Ant/Reutr)