One in six Norwegians older than 80 has Alzheimer’s and the numbers are even higher in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, there’s no known treatment for this debilitating disease.
However, a new and innovative method may offer light at the end of the tunnel and it’s been discovered with the help of AI.
The study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering journal and conducted by the Institute of Clinical Medicine, the University of Oslo, and the Akershus University Hospital, notes that an AI method helped the team pinpoint new medicines for Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s Destroys the Cells’ Management of Waste
One of the major contributors to Alzheimer’s is the degeneration and loss of nerve cells in the brain that eventually cause memory loss. A cell works like a finely-tuned machine and it needs the right energy to do its job. This energy is acquired from mitochondria.
When the cells are young and healthy, the damaged mitochondria are removed from the cells in a process known as mitophagy. According to the team, as we age, more mitochondria are broken and the cells become less efficient at removing them all.
The increase of broken mitochondria diminishes the cell’s processes and eventually causes them to die. The head of the research, associate professor Evandro F. Fang, notes that cells need energy produced by mitochondria so that they can clean waste successfully.
How Does the New Innovative Method Work?
The researchers explain that they may be able to lower or prevent the disease’s progress by boosting the capacity of the cells to self-clean.
Since clogging is an issue, the researchers focused on finding a method to better it. They looked into the mitophagy inducers trying to find a better substance for the management of waste in the brain cells of the patient.
The mitophagy’s reboot provides several benefits like increased brain waste removal and more effective cleaning. And, it may also better the cleaning in other organs, not just in the brain.
By improving mitophagy, the researchers emphasize that the work and function of other organs like the muscles and heart may also be bettered.
The team relied on AI to find these cleaning substances or the mitophagy inducers. The computer program browsed through a big catalog of substances and identified two of them as the most potent ones, i.e. Kaempferol and Rhapontigenin.
They used them on lab animals and documented their effect on their nerve cells. The process of finding these substances took three months and the program researched from 3000 known mitophagy-inducing substances.
If they didn’t rely on AI but on traditional methods, it would probably take more than three years to find the candidates.
The team has filed for a patent on Rhapontigenin for Alzheimer’s treatment and is now focused on describing how these two substances may help postpone the loss of memory and slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s.
What’s more, they’ll also focus on the in-depth molecular mechanisms through which these two substances induce mitophagy.
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