So did we Help in this possible Alzheimers cure

[Grandpa_01]

They mention proteins miss folding in the article and I was just wondering if some of the folding we do may have been used in their research.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24462699

[RMouse]

Great question. Is any other research group doing as much to study protein folding as the Pande Group? Hard to imagine anyone else with as much CPU power as this one.

[Jesse_V]

There are many other groups of researchers that are studying protein folding, the PG is not the only one. Some of those teams have their own cluster. IBM's BlueGene and D.E. Shaw's Anton are other powerful computer systems that those teams use. Some prefer to focus on experiments in the lab rather than computers. There are many ways to get results.

I do not have access to the full article, so I can't look up how they are studying things. One of the jobs of a scientist is to be up-to-date with the scientific discoveries of others in the field and whether or not someone else has produced something that could be a help to them. (You see this in other fields too, a famous proof in mathematics was only possible because of the connections provided by others.) Now, I don't know if the University of Leicester team has heard of the team at Stanford and F@h, but it is likely that they have. It would not surprise me that they've read each others' papers.

It's important to note that the BBC picked up on the "this is a turning point" headline based on the opinion of one scientist. (We see headlines like this about once or twice a year.) I am really impressed by their discovery, and I can see why they are so excited, but I would really like to see how the scientific community reacts to this discovery, and how many citations the paper gains over time. That would be a truer test of the impact in my mind.

[bruce]

The news report on BBC World News talked about prions and plaques and tangles in the brain. FAH is studying how/why they form and (probably) evaluating specific drugs mathematically. The University of Leicester study was a lab study of Mice. Studies in silico, in vivo, and in vitro are each best for different things and the ultimate answers most certainly come from a combination of studies.

At this point, the clinical trial in mice is a very important step, but until there's a successful clinical trial in humans, it's only one step in a long path. FAH may have contributed one or more earlier steps and still may contribute future steps but Jesse_V's reference to Fermat's Last Theorem is a very apt example of how science works.

[P5-133XL]

It is always nice to see a direct link from what we do to the final solution but in science that is not always visible. There are far too many people doing too many things for that expectation to be realistic. All those scientific failures, validation experiments, and side tracks all matter for if they were not there the actual solution might not have been found or found at a much later date. It is all nice and fine to be inside the direct line of the ending solution but I for one do not require that from my donation.

[Jesse_V]

It is always nice to see a direct link from what we do to the final solution but in science that is not always visible. There are far too many people doing too many things for that expectation to be realistic. All those scientific failures, validation experiments, and side tracks all matter for if they were not there the actual solution might not have been found or found at a much later date. It is all nice and fine to be inside the direct line of the ending solution but I for one do not require that from my donation.

That's well said.

[JCM3500]

Is there any Alzheimer's research available on FAH at this time? I have not seen any for months.....

Thanks,

John