Alzheimer’s

A physician friend asked if a patient’s APOE status (which alleles they carry, for example APOE4, APOE3, or APOE2) would effect how well they should respond to telomerase therapy. Ideally, it may not make much difference, except that the genes you carry (including the APOE genes and the alleles for each type of APOE gene, […]

A major stumbling block in our understanding of age-related disease, such as Alzheimer’s, is a propensity to focus on large numbers of genes, proteins, etc., without asking what lies “upstream” that results in the associations between such genes (etc.) and the disease. While some would tout the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence to attack the […]

Several of you have asked why I don’t update this blog more often. My priority is to take effective interventions for age-related diseases to FDA phase 1 human trials, rather than blogging about the process. Each week, Outlook reminds me to update the blog, but there are many tasks that need doing if we are […]

Recently, John Cooke at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, showed that telomerase, when expressed in cells from progeric children, caused a “substantial physiologically relevant and meaningful effect on the lifespan and function of the cells.” As many of you know, progeria is a disease in which young children appear old, with baldness and osteoarthritis, and […]

Why do Alzheimer’s interventions always fail? Whether you ask investors or pharmaceutical companies, it has become axiomatic that Alzheimer’s “has been a graveyard for many a company”, regardless of what they try. But in a fundamental way, all past and all current companies – whether big pharma or small biotech – try the same approach. […]

What is regenerative medicine? To bystanders, regenerative medicine might be merely a catch-all category or simply a current medical fashion. The reality, however, is that regenerative medicine represents a conceptual, material, and historical transformation of human medical care. Even the key researchers and clinicians who are moving this field ahead are often so busy in […]

Curing disease correlates with insight, not blind effort. There is an eternal trade-off between insight and effort. If we think carefully, understand the problem, and plan, then effort is minimized. If (as too often happens) we think carelessly, misunderstand the problem, and rely on hope instead of planning, then effort is not only maximized, but […]

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 […]

Often, when problems seem intractable, we’re asking the wrong questions. We want to get to the moon: how can we jump higher? We want to get to the stars: how can we make bigger rockets? As Henry Ford once suggested, people wanted a better way to travel, so they wanted to know how to breed […]

Hardly a day goes by, and never an entire week, without my seeing yet another article, often a cover article, that suggests we will soon cure Alzheimer’s disease. If articles were anything to go by, then the increasing tempo of those articles, to say nothing of the increases in both research and funding, would suggest […]

We waste stunning amounts of money and effort on comprehensively ineffective trials. As a recent article points out, in the past 15 years, there have been 123 Alzheimer drug failures and, while four medicines have been approved, none of them affect the progress of the disease. Symptomatic therapy at best, we have no medications – […]

Perspective often shrinks personal problems. Late Sunday night, I received a cry for help from a woman whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease: she asked me to meet her family and offer professional advice. Their concern was not only her medications, but the ability of her physician, the stress on the family, and the patient’s own […]

Early last Saturday, I received a short, sad email from an old friend. Many of you may know Leonard Hayflick, who first pointed out that cells age, more than fifty years ago. He stood up for himself and for the truth of his data, in the face of strong opposition and irrationality, and finally proved […]

The problem with prediction is that everyone disagrees about the future (and don’t look ahead anyway). Most of us look backward and assume that the view will be just the same (but more so?) if we turned around and looked ahead. The wonderful thing about hindsight is that not only is it easy, but everyone […]

History provides perspective, probably because we keep repeating it. Several hundred years ago, smallpox was the scourge of Europe. Treatment, such as it was, consisted of compassion, fluids, and a gamut of various herbs, bark, roots, and fungal preparations, none of which changed the mortality. The diligent healer of the late middle ages tried hard […]