Butler Hospital vaccine attacks
the disease before it can advance
“Oh, God,” said Joan Barnowski as she put her hand to her forehead, an expression of pain on her face. She was speaking about her mother in a nursing home staring vacantly, not knowing her own daughter from a stranger off the street.
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The vision haunts her, since three years ago doctors diagnosed Barnowski with Alzheimer’s disease, the same disease afflicting her mother, the same disease that afflicted her grandmother.
Barnowski, 62, said she worries for her children and her 12 grandchildren. She worries they might be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s one day.
That’s why when she saw an ad on the television for a clinical study of a vaccine to treat Alzheimer’s, she said, “That’s what I have to do.”
Since then, Barnowski has had four treatments at Butler Hospital, which is the only private nonprofit psychiatric and substance abuse hospital for adults in Rhode Island.
Butler Hospital is one of five sites in the United States testing vaccines that could slow or cease the disease from progressing, said Dr. Stephen Salloway, director of the hospital’s memory and aging program.
The vaccine contains a tiny fragment of toxic amyloid – a protein that builds up outside nerve cells in the brain, causing a person to develop Alzheimer’s. Salloway said the hope is that the patient, once injected with a fragment of the protein, will start building antibodies that destroy amyloid deposits, or at least keep them from clogging communication between nerve cells, which causes memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients.
That is the hope.
To date, no one has tried to treat a neurological disease with a vaccine, said Dr. Lawrence Price, director of research at Butler.
“Until the last 10 years we haven’t really understood the neurobiology of these disorders to understand what a biological target would be,” he said. Now that researchers know the target is amyloid, more and more studies focus on slowing or stopping it from being deposited. That is a departure from the symptom-focused treatments of the past, but the size of the aging baby boomer generation increases the pressure to stop the disease before it strikes.
Salloway said even though genetics plays a huge role in the development of Alzheimer’s, age is the biggest risk factor. The rate at which a person can develop Alzheimer’s doubles every five years after age 60. About 30 to 50 percent of 85-year-olds develop the disease.
Butler Hospital is testing about four other Alzheimer’s treatments in addition to the active amyloid vaccine, he said. About four participants are involved in clinical testing of a passive amyloid vaccine, which involves developing the antibody to amyloid in the laboratory then infusing it into a patient through an IV every three months for 18 months.
Two participants volunteered for the active amyloid vaccine study. All of them have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Butler researchers hope to recruit a total of 10 to 20 participants for each study (Barnowski is taking part in the passive amyloid study).
Though there could be side effects, Barnowski said she’s willing to take the chance.
“If it works, then my children will be safe,” she said. “They will have the medicine to help them … they won’t have to think, ‘Am I going to lose it one day?’ ”
Salloway said the clinical studies have been successful in mice models. In that test method, mice are injected with the genes that cause Alzheimer’s in humans. Once injected with the gene, researchers breed the mice to produce a mouse that develops amyloid deposits in the brain.
Mice injected with the active amyloid vaccine were able to build the antibodies needed to prevent further buildup of the protein, he said. Mice that had amyloid in the brain before the vaccine had very little or no buildup of the protein after being injected with the vaccine.
“Just because it works in an animal doesn’t mean it will work in a human,” Salloway said. “But it’s promising.”
Though the mouse testing doesn’t take place at Butler Hospital, researchers helped design the clinical trials in conjunction with drug companies that provide millions of funding dollars, he said.
Butler researchers also study which genes cause Alzheimer’s disease. They also develop new MRI imaging techniques for detecting early signs of the disease.
“We desperately need treatment that slows the disease,” Salloway said. Doing so will “save people the heartache … and save our economy money for treating it. There’s a great need.”
