UNM Researchers Develop Vaccine to Possibly Prevent Alzheimer's Disease

University of New Mexico (UNM) researchers think their research has yielded a vaccine to prevent Alzheimer's disease, reports KRQE . UNM's Nicole Maphis said the vaccine was designed to target a specific protein often found in the brain of persons with Alzheimer's. "What we chose to pursue was a specific region of tau, as you saw pathological tau the red structures, that are common in Alzheimer's disease," she noted. Maphis added that "these antibodies seem to have cleared pathological tau. Pathological tau is one of the components of these tangles that we find in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease." Maze-like tests using mice showed that animals given the vaccine performed a lot better than those that were not. However, UNM Professor Kiran Bhaskar cautioned that "we got to make sure that we have a clinical version of the vaccine so that we can test in people." Once a vaccine is developed that is safe for humans, it must be submitted to the FDA for approval — a process that might take another five years.