Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have demonstrated for the first time that the protein midkine plays a preventative role in Alzheimer’s disease.

Midkine is known to accumulate in Alzheimer’s patients, but rather than accelerate the disease, it seems to prevents a second, sticky protein from clumping together—the chief hallmark in this form of dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease drug research almost exclusively focuses on amyloid beta, referred to sometimes as tau protein—its molecular class. There are 6 kinds of tau proteins, and they’re necessary for maintaining the stability of microtubules in human nerve fibers, but when tau proteins—in particular amyloid beta—become hyperphosphorylated, they are observed to clump together around neurons and cause a kind of atrophy.

This

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