On modeling Alzheimer's better

When it comes to Alzheimer’s research, we keep coming up on dead ends. So maybe it’s time researchers get back to basics — and instead of testing drugs in humans and failing miserably, they instead work on developing better mouse models for the disease.

That’s exactly what Jackson Laboratory and Indiana University are doing right now — with aims to release a handful of new mouse models that produce more human-like amyloid and tau proteins.

“The vast majority of those models don’t model the other pathologies of the disease,” John Dunlop, the vice president of neuroscience research at Amgen, told STAT. “As we move into therapeutics approaches that are not directly targeting amyloid, we’ll need to generate mouse models that are based on the mechanistic biology we’re looking at.”