Researcher Tests Claim that Tau, not Plaque, Is Cause for Alzheimer’s Disease

As a young PhD student at Cambridge University in the 1980s, Claude Wischik, MD, PhD, was on a mission to collect brains in an effort to determine what causes Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which afflicts about 36 million people worldwide. Over a dozen years, he collected more than 300 brains from patients soon after death.

The Alzheimer’s researcher from Australia has long backed the minority view that a protein in the brain called tau — not plaque — is largely responsible for AD. The 63-year-old believes that a protein called tau — which forms twisted fibers known as tangles inside the brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients — is largely responsible for driving the disease, in a theory that goes against much of the scientific community. For 20 years, billions of dollars of pharmaceutical investment has supported a different theory that places chief blame on a different protein, beta amyloid, which forms sticky plaques in the brains of sufferers. But a string of experimental drugs designed to attack beta amyloid recently failed in clinical trials, including two this summer. For Dr. Wischik, this could spell opportunity for tau. For more information, click here to read the full release.