dementia

Alzheimer’s Patients Show Traces of Cellular Batteries in Blood

Biomarker Discovery Could Aid Diagnosis and Therapeutic Development

extracellular vesicles containing genetic material

Our cells can’t afford to be wasteful, so they prefer to recycle broken components. However, when the mitochondria that provide their energy are damaged beyond repair, cells may have no choice but to throw them out. New IRP research suggests that more of this mitochondrial debris floats in the blood of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, potentially providing an easy, cost-effective way to diagnose or even possibly predict the illness.

Untangling Alzheimer’s Disease — DNA Damage in Alzheimer’s

Drs. Hyundong Song and Yujun Hou, standing together here in their lab, are postdoctoral fellows working to find ways that doctors may one day effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Given that Alzheimer’s is such a complex disease with many causes and pathways, it is not surprising that the search for effective treatments has proven difficult. So I spoke with Drs. Yujun Hou and Hyundong Song, postdoctoral fellows in the IRP’s Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to learn more about their approaches to meeting the challenge.