Chestnut Ridge Center, West Virginia University’s psychiatric hospital, will conduct the trials on Bryostatin, a drug originally created as an anti-cancer chemotherapy.
Interest and anticipation are mounting, says James Stevenson, MD, Chair of the WVU Department of Behavioral Medicine & Psychiatry.
“Anytime you folks interview us about what’s going on at BRNI, or WVU or Chestnut Ridge Center we get a lot of inquiries, ‘Oh, I have a friend, I have a parent or a loved one that we’d like to get into the trial.’”
Stevenson will oversee the month-long Bryostatin trial which will involve an initial 10 patients from Chestnut Ridge’s dementia clinic.
“But if we’re successful, then eventually as we prove where we believe the drug will be most effective in terms of its dosage, then we’ll open it up to broader trials,” said Stevenson.
Bryostatin joins several promising drugs throughout the world, in various stages of testing, that affect the disease’s process and could actually stop or slow the disease’s progression.
BRNI was founded 10 years ago by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ( D-W.Va) in honor of his mother who died of Alzheimer’s in 1992 at age 83.
“There’s no climbing back up the hill with Alzheimer’s, except if there comes to be a cure,” said Rockefeller. “When somebody you love is taken away from you slowly or quickly, it’s not something you ever forget.”
The institute was started with a 15 million dollar donation by the Rockefeller Family Foundation and a personal donation from the senator and his wife Sharon, the amount undisclosed.
“It goes way beyond my mother, although she will always be the motivation for it,” said Rockefeller. “It’s a moral crusade.”
The explanation of how Bryostatin may treat Alzheimer’s begins at a synapse, a place where one neuron, a brain cell, connects to another neuron, sending messages to that neuron.
We have billions of neurons forming trillions of synapses. Learning and memories are formed at these connections.
“Alzheimer’s is a disease of synaptic connections,” said Daniel Alkon, MD, BRNI Scientific Director.
“We start to lose our mental function, our mental capacity, because we’re losing those connections.”
Bryostatin, and several drugs BRNI has developed, activate a protein that BRNI scientists have found to be a conductor of chemical events within neurons that are critical in learning and memory.
“This target for drugs when you activate it, changes the connections in exactly the same way that memory does when we start to store information, suggesting that these drugs may be useful in Alzheimer’s Disease as well as other diseases of memory,” said Alkon.
Laboratory testing on mice showed Bryostatin and BRNI designed-drugs, can protect against memory loss, restore lost synapses, stimulate the birth of new synapses, and reduce the toxic Alzheimer’s protein A Beta.
Bryostatin also improved and restored memory destroyed by stoke, head trauma and aging.
The start date for the upcoming drug trial has not been released.
Stevenson says the first trial starts with observation following a single dose of the drug. Additional trials to test increased dosages are highly likely with multiple institutional trials a few years down the road.
He adds a word of caution.
“Translating from a laboratory with animals to human beings, oftentimes we don’t see the same effectiveness,” said Stevenson. “So we have to be prepared that we’re just at the front end of a clinical understanding of how to use this medication.”
“Now, I don’t want to sound pessimistic about it because I’m not. This is a very promising medication and it’s incalculable the effect it could have on the human population.”
BRNI is the only non-profit institute in the world dedicated solely to the study of human memory and the diseases of memory.
Currently 17 scientists and dozens of assistants are working in a 78,000 square foot facility dedicated last October on the campus of West Virginia University.
For more on the upcoming drug trials and the groundbreaking research at the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, tune in to Outlook, Thursday at 9pm and Sunday at 6pm on West Virginia PBS.