A SCOTS university has announced a partnership with Takeda, Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company, in a bid to develop treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s.
The University of Dundee Drug Discovery Unit will work with Takeda to develop possible new therapeutic treatments for tau pathology, an underlying feature in several forms of neurodegenerative disease.
Alzheimer’s disease affects 50 million people worldwide and numbers of sufferers are expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, representing a “vast and growing unmet medical need”.
It is hoped this move will bring a potential treatment “one step closer”.
READ MORE: End 'inequality' of dementia patients paying for their care
Tau pathology is found in the brains of sufferers of more than 20 different neurodegenerative diseases, of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most common.
It is increasingly thought to be an important driver of disease progression.
Recent studies demonstrate that tau pathology can spread from diseased to healthy cells in a “seeding” process, which is the focus of this collaboration.
Working in collaboration with Dr Will McEwan at University of Cambridge and Dr Leo James at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the unit has identified preventative drug-like molecules.
READ MORE: Takeda to hold key shareholder vote on £46bn Shire deal
The partnership with Takeda will accelerate the progression of these drug-like molecules towards clinical development, with the potential to become much-needed therapies.
Dr David Gray, of the Drug Discovery Unit, said, “Our mission is to bridge the gap between innovative life science research and drug development in areas of unmet clinical need, and Alzheimer’s disease is at the top of the list.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here