Repurposing Drugs for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Title: Repurposing Drugs for the Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease (PROMISE) --- Being the leading cause of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) places large demands on both affected individuals and the healthcare system. With 10 million new cases of dementia per year (World Health Organization, 2023) and marginal efficacy of de novo developed drugs, there is an urgent need for continued research on disease modifying drugs for AD. AD pathology involves multiple interacting underlying mechanisms, suggesting that treatment should simultaneously target multiple aspects of the pathology. In PROMISE we aim to meet these needs by studying the synergistic effect of two repurposed drugs, which are drugs that have already been approved or are currently being tested for treating other diseases or conditions. These drugs have previously shown promise in attenuating pathology and improving cognitive performance in a preclinical model of AD. Repurposing drugs can save researchers a considerable amount of resources, and thus be a more sustainable and effective way of making treatments available faster to AD patients. PROMISE will focus on the elucidation of the synergistic mode of interaction of the repurposed drugs at the synaptic and network level. In the first stage, we aim to determine the effects of the combinatorial administration of two repurposed drugs, using advanced cellular models integrating state-of-the-art neural engineering approaches combined with electrophysiology. In the second stage, we aim to use computational models to predict optimal network responses and modes of administering the drugs. With the findings from PROMISE we hope to provide refined suggestions of optimal timepoints and administration routes of the drugs for further in vivo testing in AD mouse models. --- References: World Health Organization (2023). Dementia. Retrieved 28.08.23 from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia