MGC seeks to develop drug therapies that will successfully intervene in the course of neurodegenerative diseases, with an emphasis on Alzheimer's disease (AD). One of the main reasons that efficacious treatments for AD are unavailable is due to the lack of a model system facilitating the development of drug screening protocols. Preliminary evidence gathered by the laboratory of Dr. Peter Davies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, together with the scientists at MGC, demonstrated by immunoblot analysis that AD-specific antigens can be induced in a human neuroblastoma cell line. The work proposed in Phase I will expand on this finding by identifying more cell lines that express AD antigens, identifying cellular treatment conditions that affect expression, and by developing a rapid enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELlSA) protocol to detect specific AD antigens induced in cultured cells. This assay will allow us to efficiently screen large numbers of drugs in Phase Il of this proposal for compounds that will prevent the appearance of AD-specific antigens.
