What we can expect from medical research: Part 2
Deeper into the brain and further into the genes
Alexander Starikov, Science Illustrated
Another article about the directions of medical research from the prepared for BFM.ru the journal Science Illustrated a thematic series of articles about the most promising scientific research of the next decade (the first one – "Medicine has decided on the tasks for the decade" – was published yesterday).
Today is the second article about global challenges in the field of medicine. It is about how scientists are getting deeper into the mechanism of the immune and nervous systems, trying to find a cure, including for Alzheimer's disease.
The scale of the problem can be judged by this example: Alzheimer's disease will soon cost the United States more than $ 1 trillion. Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in the book "The State Strategy of Japan in the XXI century" examines the 10 most important tasks on which the future of the country depends, and calls the creation of a cure for Alzheimer's disease as the most urgent and important. It takes 10-15 years and an average of $1.3 billion to develop drugs that can cope with such a serious illness.
The immune system: on the way to vaccines against malaria and AIDSEvery day, the immune system is fighting against pathogenic and deadly microorganisms trying to enter our body.
The army of specialized cells of the human body is armed with antibodies and other protective mechanisms that effectively recognize and destroy insidious invaders. Doctors have learned to use the impact force of immunity, developing vaccines that will defeat HIV, malaria and cancer in the future. But the immune system is a double–edged sword, in some cases it aims a weapon against the body's own cells. This leads to the most dangerous diseases – diabetes and multiple sclerosis, which were considered incurable until new methods of treatment were discovered.
Immunotherapy against multiple sclerosis. The immune system protects the body. The key to its normal functioning is the ability to distinguish foreign bodies from its own cells. Sometimes the mechanism fails, which leads to the appearance of autoimmune diseases, such as, for example, multiple sclerosis. The disease is considered incurable because the immune system is not able to forget the chosen opponent once. In 2009, Richard Burt from Northwestern University in Chicago managed to find a method for treating this disease. After chemotherapy, his patients' immune systems were destroyed. The doctor restored it with the help of stem cells, which re-taught the immune system to distinguish its own cells from foreign bodies. In almost all patients, the condition has improved significantly.
Such treatment is very radical and is suitable only for the most severe patients, as it makes the patient extremely vulnerable to infections. Scientists plan to develop more gentle methods.
An effective antibiotic. The widespread use of antibiotics has led to the fact that many pathogenic bacteria have developed resistance to them and become invulnerable, which leads to numerous deaths.
With the help of new types of antibiotics, scientists hope to overcome the mechanisms of bacterial resistance. A necessary condition is a coordinated reduction in the use of antibiotics worldwide.
A vaccine against malaria and AIDS. Vaccination is the best method to prevent the disease. Vaccines are cheap to produce and use, and have virtually no side effects. But it is not always possible to develop the right medicine. There is still no vaccine against AIDS and malaria, which annually claim millions of human lives.
The malaria parasite, going through a complex life cycle in the host body, is constantly changing, so it is difficult for the immune system to recognize it. The HIV virus is also constantly mutating, affecting the cells of the immune system necessary for the vaccine to work. However, clinical trials show that scientists are on the right track.
Nervous system: where is the thought hiding in the brain?
The human brain is the greatest miracle of nature: thanks to it, we are endowed with the abilities for creativity, communication, emotions. Scientists have been trying to understand how the brain works for a long time, and only recently, as a result of extensive work on mapping chemical processes occurring in gray matter, they were able to trace the pathways of thought impulses passing through billions of neurons in the brain. Mapping not only allows you to identify the causes of physical and mental illnesses, but also to develop new methods of their treatment. An inside view is an opportunity to manipulate the neural signals of the brain with the help of electrodes in order to eliminate failures in the neural network and restore order in it.
The vaccine against Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is a serious disease that later develops into dementia. It manifests itself when foci of demyelination appear in the brain – the so-called senile plaques. The risk of this disease, from which a person dies after 7-10 years, increases in old age and reaches 50% among people who have lived to the age of 90. Despite the widespread spread of Alzheimer's disease, there is no effective method of its treatment yet.
Meanwhile, this is a global and growing problem. According to the forecast of experts from the United States, the number of Americans with Alzheimer's disease by 2050 will increase from the current 5.5 million to 13.5, and the cost of their treatment – from 172 billion to 1 trillion dollars. The costs associated with the progression of the disease of Medicare, one of the federal health insurance programs, according to these calculations, will increase by 600%, to 630 billion. And this will certainly lead to serious changes in the insurance and pharmaceutical market. After all, scientific research in the field of medicine sometimes resembles wandering in the desert. Sometimes pharmaceutical companies stop experimenting with new drugs, which took millions to develop, because of the futility of further work.
The most difficult problem in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease is overcoming the blood-brain barrier. It prevents the penetration of the drug from the blood into the brain and may be directly related to the development of the disease. Thus, scientists use antibodies, or so-called therapeutic vaccines, to use the internal defense mechanisms of the immune system to prevent the formation of plaques.
Treatment of parkinsonism. Violation of the biochemical balance in the central part of the brain leads to shaking paralysis – Parkinsonism. The methods of traditional medicine are ineffective here and often cause side effects, since a healthy area of the brain suffers during treatment. Now scientists are developing new methods of treating Parkinson's disease, using electrodes to monitor brain activity. The method is called deep brain stimulation and is increasingly used in the treatment of patients suffering from this disease.
The platinum electrode is implanted deep into the basal ganglia of the brain, which control muscle movements. From the outside, the electrode is connected to a wire leading to the collarbone or diaphragm. Here it is connected to a power source and a pulse generator implanted under the skin. The electrodes act on the neurons with a stream of electrical impulses, reducing the tremor by half.
Scientists are not only developing the latest intelligent systems that read the patient's brain activity and turn on immediately before the next tremor attack. They also seek to find the neurons involved in the development of parkinsonism and prevent tremor attacks by increasing or decreasing the activity of these neurons.
Decoding the brain. The incredible potential of the human brain is explained by the ability of its various regions to interact with each other in a complex way. Probably, both the high level of intelligence and some mental disorders are explained by structural changes in this interaction. That's why neurologists are now creating a diagram of the neural connections of brain cells to understand how it works.
Creating a map of the network interaction of the brain is a very difficult task, because it consists of 100 billion neurons. The main instruments are a magnetic resonance tomograph and a microscope. In addition, the passage of nerve impulses through the brain will help to track the fluorescent proteins of the jellyfish, highlighting individual neurons in different colors.
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07.01.2011