Alzheimer’s Disease Stem Cell Drug Screening in 3-D

The search for drugs that would be effective in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been extremely slow and time consuming. In order to hasten the process, we propose to use stem cells derived from Alzheimer’s patients to test drugs previously approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of other diseases. In addition to investigating the effect of these drugs on the levels of the toxic proteins found in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, we will study changes in relevant proteins that may cause potential toxic side effects for these candidate Alzheimer therapeutics. The importance of this project is that it will lay the foundation for developing FDA-approved drugs as novel therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of, and do so in an efficient, cost-effective manner.