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Invited review: Drug development for tauopathies
Author(s) -
Grüninger Fiona
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
neuropathology and applied neurobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.538
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1365-2990
pISSN - 0305-1846
DOI - 10.1111/nan.12192
Subject(s) - drug development , drug , drug discovery , neuroscience , medicine , tau protein , computational biology , bioinformatics , pharmacology , psychology , biology , disease , pathology , alzheimer's disease
Many different approaches to treating tauopathies are currently being explored, with a few compounds already in clinical development (including small molecules such as anti‐aggregation compound LMTX and active vaccines AAD vac1 and ACI ‐35). This review aims to summarize the status of the clinical candidates and to highlight the emerging areas of research that hold promise for drug development. Tau is post‐translationally modified in several different ways (phosphorylated, acetylated, glycosylated and truncated). The extent of these modifications can be manipulated to influence tau aggregation state and pathogenesis and the enzymes involved provide tractable targets for drug intervention. In addition, modulation of tau expression levels is an attractive therapeutic approach. Finally, the recently described prion‐like spreading of tau between cells opens up novel avenues from the tau drug development perspective. The review compares the merits of small‐molecule and antibody‐based therapies and emphasizes the need for amenable clinical biomarkers for drug development, particularly PET imaging.