Japanese university finds Alzheimer's drug effective in treating ALS in mice | Hacker News Reader

Japanese university finds Alzheimer's drug effective in treating ALS in mice

english.kyodonews.net

190 pointsamichail60 comments

If anyone is interested in a promising drug tested in humans and not mice, AMX0035 is under FDA review and had positive Phase II results.

https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/comment/potential-fda-ap...

Valdenafil (Levitra) has shown some effect on ALS [1]. Coincidentally, the related sildenafil (Viagra) was identified through computer-aided research as a drug of interest in Alzheimer's prevention. [2]

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096999611... 2. https://www.everydayhealth.com/alzheimers-disease/viagra-may...

It has very interesting effects. You'll find that it helps with ingrown hairs. They'll begin to get out on their own, within hours of taking it orally and in general become very eager to come out with simple hand motions.

Someone should look into it. Consistent effect. I looked into it years ago and indeed PDE5 inhibition has something to do with ingrown hairs.

It seems like a commonality if all these drugs that have multiple positive effects is that they all increase blood flow in some way? Am I wrong?

Yes, Viagra in particular works by causing vasodilation.

A very large, six-year study in US Veterans Administration patients (N = tens of thousands), published in April, has shown that having had a recent Tdap vaccine predicts a 40% decrease in risk of dementia.

It is hard to imagine a confounder with such an effect size. (I got my Tdap booster right away, because why not?) The result was so surprising that a completely independent cohort was checked and showed an effect of the same size.

No one knows yet which component of the Tdap vaccine administered is responsible for the result.

The Viagra effect size reported was 60%. I doubt aspirin would show 60% against headache. (Unrelated, Viagra sometimes causes headache :)

I asked a neurologist I know about ALS drugs and he doesn't have a lot of faith in any of them.

On a personal note, my mother had ALS. I can tell you it is a terrible disease and a terrible way to go. I really do hope they find something for it.

I'm sorry that your mother had to go through that. My partner is a neurologist and she hates having to give an ALS diagnosis. It fills her with dread when symptoms align with a possible ALS diagnosis. If she doesn't have a conclusion diagnosis she will sometimes not even suggest that something might be ALS because of the suicide risk. Personally, I think we will have a treatment for it in my lifetime.

>It fills her with dread when symptoms align with a possible ALS diagnosis. If she doesn't have a conclusion diagnosis she will sometimes not even suggest that something might be ALS because of the suicide risk.

This is a huge problem. Someone close to our family spent a lot of money to get a diagnosis because none of the doctors wanted to "go there". They ended up having to visit the MAYO Clinic for 2 weeks and spent a small fortune to find out, it hurt the family financially.

My middle school chemistry teacher offed himself in his backyard with a shotgun when he started noticing symptoms of Huntington's (which his mother died of). I'd taken chemistry with him the previous year and he was easily the best chemistry teacher ever.

It's an issue but without a cure or even viable ameliorative treatment, suicide is 100% a a legit personal choice.

Suicide is not personal, as with any pre-mature death. It greatly affects the surviving family.

So does ALS. People only live on average 2-5 years post-diagnosis, anyway, so, suicide really only speeds up the inevitable by a very tiny bit.

The immediate family member dying with Huntington's disease also clearly affected the rest of the family, that's basically saying her death wasn't personal either. Maybe this is an overly reductive false dilemma.

Knowing an immediate family member died of something that has a genetic component gives people catalysts to watch closely for.

It it my understanding from talking to the same neurologist that ALS is a diagnosis of exclusion. When everything is ruled out the last diagnosis is ALS.

Is that because ALS is such an unwelcome diagnosis that all alternative diagnoses are explored first?

Or is there some other reason for testing theories in that order?

Generally the exclusion method is used because there is no conclusive direct test (or the test itself is damaging). Alzheimer's has no direct test either to my knowledge, though there is a lot of work going on.

https://www.emcell.com/treatments/als-mnd/

A potential treatment option for ALS, using fetal stem cells, and so why not widely known - especially not in North America; free documentary on the Emcell clinic here - https://stemcellsmovie.com/ - they've been doing research using fetal stem cells for 30 years, and providing clinically for 25.

MS is also apparently stopped and regressed (damage/degeneration healed) if treated/healed if degeneration of the body's healing systems aren't too far degraded.

Good. A few years back, I was having questionable symptoms that pointed towards ALS, and my neurologist made the mistake of telling me.

The two months between that day and the round of tests that were able to prove his theory wrong were very easily the worst of my life.

Very promising! I hope the human trials will be effective, we'll have to see in a few years how it all plays out.

Until then, it's great news for mice all around.

…But they aren’t saying what the drug is

This publication, which has Takeo Kato as author, might be useful (it's about a curcumin derivative):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34894926/

You would think they'd work on human alzheimers before worrying about the mice. /s

in mice.

Is this trope necessary every time? It's clearly in mice in the article.

Just consider it an update if you're skeptical, now they'll be moving on to the next set of mice w/ sporadic or non-inherited ALS....

It took them 6 paragraphs to mention mice. Thats astonishing how much they oversell this kind of stuff.

Is it really such a big deal for them to build hype around a potentially promising medical advancement? What's the downside of this kind of reporting? Even if the drug fails, maybe it will spur more research into similar candidates

This type of reporting contributes to announcement fatigue. What use is all this hype now for something that is probably 5 years out from the market, if it even works (which past results suggest is unlikely).

Has that actually been demonstrated? I don't personally feel fatigued by medical advancements which ended up not panning out. In fact they make me feel hopeful about the future and glad to exist in a society where such research is even possible.

Maybe you are still young? When you have seen 30 years of such revolutionary tech in pharma every other week with 0.001 % actual outcomes on the market, yes, you get tired of it.

I am approximately 30 if that's what you meant. I think a 0.001% success rate is pretty good for revolutionary technologies and I'm glad to have those successes. I think it is wrong to downplay the importance of the failed attempts just to increase that success rate. More absolute successes is strictly better than a higher success rate.

getting clicks for overhyping stuff that in 99.99% of the case does not even make it to human trials. Shoving ads in your face at the same time.

Admittedly I'm using an adblocker and didn't notice the latter problem, which sounds annoying. But I don't see why the former is a problem on its own.

They could have tried the drug on humans but they wouldn’t have had the results they got with mice.

They probably have plenty of candidates, but if the outcome would make the situation worse for the patient... Well, they'd be in for a world of bad PR and possibly legal issues.

Imagine the headlines.. "Company X ruined the last living days of patient"

How do they find mice with ALS?

Mice models which have pretty much nothing to do with actual ALS.

Can you clarify? Like, I would assume that if it's still named "ALS" that there are some commonalities. If those differences are big enough (to the extent that the models are nothing alike) why is the naming shared?

Happy to accept "bad journalism"!

I dunno, but when they do research on MS (multiple sclerosis), they do it on mice with experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE), which is an animal model of MS.

You're getting downvoted, but this is exactly right. We create a mutant mouse that has symptoms that are somewhat similar to the disease we're studying. Then we find a drug that cures the "disease" in the mouse. Then we try it in humans and it fails and we make the shocked Pikachu face.

Similar deal with Alzheimer's.

If a medical researcher can't give a mouse cancer and cure it he ain't any good.

Somewhat better ones can do the same for ALS it seems.

If people are so bothered by mouse research, why don't we have a line of research aiming to make humans look more like mice?

This low-effort comment is popping up more and more.

I would say just assume the title has "in mouse disease model" at the end of it.

Then we can get away from the large dismissive negativity spiral that all of these threads turn into.

Not really low effort if it points out a huge problem in the world of scientific journalism...

Isn't this more of a problem with HN guidelines for submitting articles than anything else?

If someone reads the article, they see where it says this is in a mouse model of an uncommon form of ALS.

Yes. There are lots of problems with the HN "guidelines," not least of which that they're actually rules you get punished for breaking and not "guidelines" you can choose not to follow.

The article stated exactly the limitations of the experiment. It was conducted with mice and only mice with a less common form of ALS.

I'd say the problem is less with journalism in this instance, and more-so with peoples limited attention spans.

It's a problem with the title.

My point regarding attention span stands. The title could certain do with improvement, but people should not be consuming their news of the basis of titles.

I do because most articles are crap. The comments are simply better quality. For example, I was able to tell in 2 seconds that this was on mice from reading the comments and so that I don't care about the article.

Quite often comments are wrong, top-rated comments are often reflective of bombastic conclusions arrived at (and upvoted) by people who had not read the article.

The first page of HN has thirty articles. I can't read all of them. I don't recognize the author's names, so I can't judge by that. The number of comments does not tell me if I will be interested in the article. The title is all I have to go on.

Admittedly, I should probably assume that anything relating to Alzheimer's or Parkinson's has an implicit "(in mice)" tag.

The article didn't even name the drug. It's a terrible article.

I had a quick look around, no article seems to mention it, but the article leaves enough clues that it's pretty easy to find. The drug is curcumin derivative GT863, I'm not sure how much that enriched either of our understandings though.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356971571_Therapeut...

It appears to be on mice only in the 5th paragraph, and the sole photo is of a patient (before it is said to be on mice). Sarcasm/negativity is a normal reaction when you spot an ad for a local university with a random research with especially touches most of us. It is not so hard to be honest and support honest research and these respectable advances without such tricks.

No.

The title is clickbait. It claims there is an effective treatment for ALS.

It is so bogus. In mice should be added to the title.

Thank you, GP, for the “in mice” comment. In this case it was absolutely crucial for me getting what was going on.

"Mice lies Monkey Exaggerate"

The title is deceiving and it should contain mice. And such criticism are okay in my book.

Low effort, but high information density.

The warning is 100% correct. What works in mice only works in humans about 20% of the time and it's even smaller that it works without toxicity or adverse effects in humans even then. So eagerly expecting a human treatment is irrational and pollyanna.

Typically it's 10-20 years after animal studies such as mice or monkeys before you can expect doctors to have it available. And that's assuming everything work just right.

This is the same mistake MANY people make when some new wonder-technology is announced from university labs - it's another 20 years before an economically viable product that actually is available to consumers will be appearing. It's often called the "20 year rule". New battery technology could solve green energy? But it's just a lab discovery? Nope. Not anytime soon!!

I recently did a study of this for penicillin: it was almost exactly 20 years from Fleming discovering it to when consumers could get it from their doctors or hospitals post-WW2!

Transistors didn't start to eclipse vacuum tubes in consumer electronics until 20 years after the invention of the transistor (1948 to early 1970s). Same for integrated circuits - 20 years before the Silicon Valley boom took off (1959 to mid-to-late 1970s) and consumers started to benefit with PCs.

Every time I read about some drug that appeared to work in animal models but not in actual humans I wonder how often the opposite is true. We are necessarily limiting ourselves to drugs that work in humans + at least one other species.

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