Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is caused by the aggregation of relatively small (42 amino acid) proteins, called Abeta peptides. These proteins form aggregates which even in small clumps appear to be toxic to neurons and cause neuronal cell death involved in Alzheimer’s Disease and the horrible neurodegenerative consequences. It’s a challenge to study these aggregates, even with simulations.

We have many calculations being performed on AD. Our primary goals are the prediction of AD aggregate structure for rational drug design approaches as well as further insight into how AD aggregates form kinetically (hopefully paving the way for a method to stop the AD aggregate formation). We have made great progress towards this end.

By ADEAR: "Alzheimer's Disease Education and Referral Center, a service of the National Institute on Aging." [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
By ADEAR: “Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center, a service of the National Institute on Aging.” [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Repurposing an existing drug against the leads we have found from Folding@home

    We are continuing our work with AD in terms of repurposing an existing drug against the leads we have found from Folding@home.  The benefit of this approach is that this…

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  • Report on our progress towards our goal to develop new small molecule drug candidates for AD

    We’re very excited to report on our progress towards our goal to develop new small molecule drug candidates for AD. In a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal…

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  • Working closely with the Nanomedicine Center for Protein Folding

    We have been working closely with the Nanomedicine Center for Protein Folding on pushing our lead compounds forward. They have gone from the test tube to the first round of…

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  • Exciting results regarding new possible drug leads for Alzheimer’s

    We have had some exciting results regarding new possible drug leads for Alzheimer’s. We hope to be submitting these soon for publication.

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  • Presented our results regarding new possible drugs (small molecule leads) to fight Alzheimer’s Disease

    We presented our results regarding new possible drugs (small molecule leads) to fight Alzheimer’s Disease at a recent meeting at Stanford, supported by the NIH Roadmap Nanomedicine center and NIH…

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  • The first of the papers has come out

    The first of the papers has come out (see paper #58 on our Results page: “Simulating oligomerization at experimental concentrations and long timescales: A Markov state model approach”). In many…

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  • Significant progress experimentally testing computational predictions

    We have made some significant progress experimentally testing our computational predictions using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).

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  • First paper submitted for peer review

    We have submitted our first paper for peer review and we’re working on the next 2 paper right now. We’re very excited about the results!

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  • Prof. Vijay Pande presented recent FAH work on AD at the National Parkinson’s Foundation conference

    Prof. Vijay Pande presented recent FAH work on AD at the National Parkinson’s Foundation conference (in the session on AD and its connections to PD).

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  • BCATS 2005, best talk award in 2005

    AH researchers Vishal Vaidyanathan and Nick Kelley presented the recent FAH results on AD at BCATS 2005. Their work won the best talk award in 2005.

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  • First paper on FAH results

    We submitted our first paper on FAH results.

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