To date, the search for effective treatments for dementia has yielded only disappointments. Many recent drug candidates target the tau protein, which aggregates and forms tangles in patients’ brain tissue and is involved in 75 percent of all dementias. While tau-targeting drugs have looked promising in mouse models, they’ve failed in clinical trials.
A recent study led by Kathrin Wenger, a PhD student in the lab of Judith Steen, PhD, at Boston Children’s, suggests one reason: The available tau-based mouse models don’t correspond well with tau pathology in late-stage, symptomatic human dementia.
“We don’t think these mice are the right models,” Wenger says.
