Newswise — Sanford Burnham Prebys professor Yu Yamaguchi has been awarded a $2.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the role of heparan sulfate (HS) in Alzheimer’s disease. HS is a structural molecule found in the scaffolding between cells that has been previously observed to influence the development of Alzheimer’s disease. However, the precise function it plays in the brain has not been studied closely.
The new project will fill this gap in knowledge and open new avenues for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our hypothesis is that heparan sulfate mediates the development of Alzheimer’s by binding to a brain protein that is critical for the development of the disease,” says Yamaguchi. “If we can develop an inhibitor to block this interaction, that could provide us with new ways to treat the disease.”
HS is…
