It's called presenilin 1, the scientists announced in the June 8 issue of the journal Nature.
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But presenilin 1 is a promising drug target if it is really the mysterious gamma secretase.
But Shen argues that presenilin may have important functions in nourishing neurons that are disrupted in Alzheimer's.
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She doesn't rule out a role for amyloid, but she blames Alzheimer's on damage to two proteins called presenilin.
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She has shown in mouse experiments that eliminating the amyloid-producing genes called presenilin produces dementia and brain cell loss.
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Her conclusion years ago: Gamma secretase inhibitors like the Lilly drug would block presenilin and hence might make things worse.
Indeed, a group of Harvard scientists will also publish a paper identifying presenilin 1 as gamma secretase in the July issue of Nature Cell Biology.
When she created a strain of mice with the presenilin genes missing in their brains, the mice developed dementia and brain cell death just like Alzheimer's sufferers, but the mice had no amyloid deposits.
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