University in Takeda link-up to fight brain disease

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”.

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

Alzheimer’s disease is at the top of the list

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.

The partnership with Takeda will accelerate the progression of these druglike 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.”