Dynamic versus Static – Going to Mars or Curing AD

• Aging
• Alzheimer's
• beta amyloid
• Curing Alzheimer's
• Dementia
• tau protein

Innovation requires novel thinking, not incremental actions.

We can cure age-related diseases – such as Alzheimer’s – not with funding, intelligence, or effort alone, but only if we reassess our assumptions. Until we look carefully at our conceptual foundations, we cannot expect to build a therapeutic structure. Ironically, the key problem lies in our looking at biology, medicine, and disease as static, passive processes. One would think we would see these processes as active and dynamic, but oddly enough, we don’t.

Consider an analogy: going to visit Mars.

Clearly, we need some essentials of life-support, such as oxygen and water. If we start by asking ourselves how much of each we need per day per person, then how many days and how many persons, we end up with an enormous need for both: huge amounts of oxygen, huge amounts of water. After all, we don’t want to run out of oxygen or water, do we?

Remember, however, that in a closed system (such as a vehicle going to Mars), that neither oxygen nor water are actually used up en route, only changed from one form (such as oxygen molecules) to another (such as carbon dioxide molecules). The water molecules may be in the form of body waste, but they are still present in the vehicle. And both oxygen and water – given energy and technical forethought – can be recycled and reused indefinitely. The practical question is not simply “how much oxygen and water do we need”, but “how efficiently and quickly can we recycle oxygen and water?” In short, the key question isn’t the static and passive one of “how fast are we using up our oxygen and water?”. The key question is the active and dynamic one of “how does the rate of recycling compare to the rate of oxygen and water use?”

The analogy is exact.

In the case of Alzheimer’s, for example, the key question isn’t “how can we prevent the accumulation of beta amyloid and tau protein?”, but rather “how can we increase the rate of recycling of molecules such as beta amyloid and tau proteins?” The former question would be like asking “how can we prevent the use of oxygen and water?”, while we should be asking “how can we increase the recycling efficiency of oxygen and water?”

Current approaches to treating Alzheimer’s disease focus inordinate funding, intelligence, and effort on the wrong question. Small wonder they fail.