REVIEWProteinopathies, a core concept for understanding and ultimately treating degenerative disorders?
Section snippets
Introduction on the current status of proteinopathies
The present review focuses on proteinopathies of the central nervous system, although the concept also refers to peripheral cells, tissues and organs. The general principle of proteinopathies is that the proteins change their conformation thereby gaining toxic activity or losing the normal function. The most prominent type of a typical proteinopathy is Alzheimer's disease (AD) although many more exist as Parkinson's disease (PD), Lewy body disease, prion disease, tauopathies, amyotrophic
Alzheimer's disease as an example for both amyloidosis and tauopathy
When Alois Alzheimer presented the case of his patient Auguste D. at the Tuebingen meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatrists in 1906, he did not attract much attention or stimulated any discussion in the audience. At this meeting, Alzheimer presented Auguste D.'s symptoms and reported the histopathological features that are now associated with AD: neuron loss, extracellular amyloid plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (Fig. 1; Table 1) (Alzheimer, 1907). For more than two
Discovery of monoclonal antibodies as tools for therapy
In 1975, Köhler and Milstein established a technique to produce and isolate hybridoma cells producing one type of monoclonal antibody (Kohler and Milstein, 1975). They used a line of myeloma cells that had lost their ability to secrete antibodies, fused these cells with healthy antibody-producing B-cells, and selected for the successfully fused cells. In 1988, Winter and colleagues discovered the techniques to humanize monoclonal antibodies (Riechmann et al., 1988), allowing to develop
Outlook
The pharmaceutical industry is under growing pressure from a range of environmental issues, including major losses of revenue owing to patent expirations, increasingly cost-constrained healthcare systems and more demanding regulatory requirement (Paul et al., 2010). The number of truly innovative best-in-class or first-in-class medicines approved annually by regulatory agencies is flat or declining (Mullard, 2011, Paul et al., 2010). There are some notable exceptions namely therapeutic
Contributors
Stained brain sections were made available by Dr. Gabor Kovacz. Nasrin Saiepour made the pictures.
Role of funding sources
Nothing to state.
Conflict of interest
Nothing to declare.
Acknowldegements
Nothing to state.
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