Health Science Center awarded AlzheimerÂ’s grant
 Researchers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth have been awarded a $6 million grant to continue studying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
Money from the National Institutes of Health will be used to continue studies into how nerve cells of persons with the progressive brain disorder and related illnesses could be saved and protected. The five-year grant provides funding for two separate research projects in Fort Worth as well as projects and support work done at the University of Florida and Washington University in St. Louis.
And while it could be several years, if ever, before any of the grantÂ’s research leads to drugs on the commercial market, the work by Health Science Center investigators James Simpkins and Peter Koulen has attracted interest from several pharmaceutical companies nationwide.
“Pharmaceutical companies often use a shotgun approach to try to identify new drug targets,” Koulen said. “In academia, or academia research, you just don’t have the financial resources to do something like that.
“We (would) rather use a rational approach, where we identify potential targets in the cells, tissues, or in the organism useful to mitigate or cure a disease. And then we could come up with very specific chemicals that could be used for that process rather than looking at a library of a million chemicals.”
Estimates are that 4.5 million people in the United States have AlzheimerÂ’s.
Koulen, associate professor of pharmacology and neuroscience, is continuing his studies into how various plant-based drug compounds protect mice and human cells from harmful conditions such as the ones encountered during the development of AlzheimerÂ’s. Simpkins, chairman of the same department and director of the program project grant, is studying estrogen-related compounds to treat AlzheimerÂ’s.
Their collaborators will study how the same brain receptors that respond to nicotine react to compounds protecting nerve cells. They also will study how gene therapies may be used to treat the disease.
The grant doesnÂ’t provide funding for clinical trials, but such work is expected to begin on at least one of the projects in the next five years, Koulen said.
NIH officials didnÂ’t return calls for comment, but Koulen said itÂ’s unusual for the government agency to support an early drug-development project.
He said the collaborative structure enables the investigators to quickly respond to new developments.
Much of the early work was done by Simpkins, who once worked at the University of Florida. The NIH grant is new for the Fort Worth institution, but itÂ’s a renewal of money that has already led to drug patents and clinical trials from Florida researchers.
Local researchers also have filed for patents.
“All of these patents are for discoveries intended to protect the brain from Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, as well as more acute brain-compromising conditions (such as a) stroke or traumatic brain injury,” Simpkins said.
An AlzheimerÂ’s treatment is almost guaranteed to be lucrative. At least $100 billion nationwide is spent to care for AlzheimerÂ’s patients annually, according to the AlzheimerÂ’s Association. Medications approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration may temporarily delay memory decline in some people, but arenÂ’t known to stop the underlying degeneration of brain cells.
“Early diagnosis is absolutely critical, certainly, to discovering potentially effective drugs because every drug that has gone into advanced Alzheimer’s disease subjects has failed,” Simpkins said. “By the time folks show up with cognitive impairment, many areas of the brain are already dead and drugs can’t fix years or decades of the brain being ravaged.”
Local AlzheimerÂ’s Association officials declined to discuss SimpkinsÂ’ and KoulenÂ’s research because they were unaware of the NIH grant. But the associationÂ’s national statistics show AlzheimerÂ’s costs U.S. businesses an estimated $61 billion each year. ThatÂ’s $24.6 billion in health-care costs and $36.5 billion in costs related to care-giving, including lost productivity, absenteeism and worker replacement.
The costs are expected to increase substantially in the coming years as the population ages.
Koulen also recently received a $100,000 grant from the AlzheimerÂ’s Association to research genetic factors underlying AlzheimerÂ’s disease to find ways to keep nerve cells healthier longer.
“Our approach is not to come up with a cure and then figure out how the cure works,” he said. “We want to figure out how the disease works and then design a cure later on.”
The local association chapter contributed funding for KoulenÂ’s grant.
Both Simpkins and Koulen said more research is needed.
“Single drug therapy is not going to get it,” Simpkins said. “It’s going to take early intervention with multiple compounds or a combination of compounds, lifestyle, diet and those kinds of things to make a difference.”
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