In the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the tau protein is a major culprit. Found abundantly in our brain cells, tau is normally a team player—it maintains structure and stability within neurons, and it helps with transport of nutrients from one part of the cell to another.
All that changes when tau misfolds. It becomes sticky and insoluble, aggregating and forming neurofibrillary tangles within neurons, disrupting their function and ultimately killing them. Worse, it probably can take relatively few misfolded tau proteins from one cell to turn its neighbors into malfunctioning, dying
