CHICAGO: An international research team has developed a compound that successfully targets and destroys aggregated proteins, leading to hopes for a new class of drugs effective against a multitude of diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The researchers call the compound ‘molecular tweezers’ because it wraps around particular amino acids in the protein, not the whole aggregate, and then it both prevents the formation of toxic aggregates and also breaks down preformed ones, in a slow process. The slow cleaning is key.