New promising results published on Pharmexa’s PADRE® epitope in Alzheimer’s vaccine

Summary: A group of US scientists have tested Pharmexa’s PADRE® epitope in a second generation prototype Alzheimer’s vaccine. The results are published in the recent edition of The Journal of Neuroscience.

A group of scientists from the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Huntington Beach (California) and the Institute of Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California has published new pre-clinical data on an experimental second generation Alzheimer’s vaccine incorporating Pharmexa’s proprietary PADRE® epitope. The results are published in the recent edition of the Journal of Neuroscience (27(46):12721-12731).

The researchers have previously described promising results with a first generation vaccine using Pharmexa’s PADRE® epitope. The new second generation vaccine, a combination of two copies of a particular fragment of the Abeta peptide and PADRE®, completely eliminated potentially harmful auto-reactive T-cell responses and induced antibody responses in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimers disease. Equally important, a positive correlation between the concentration of antibodies generated and the reduction in Abeta plaques in the brain was observed. This reduction was not associated with adverse events, such as T-cell or macrophage infiltration in the brain.

These independent results once confirm the versatility of Pharmexa’s PADRE® epitope across a broad range of applications. The data also confirm Pharmexa’s hypotheses that a safe and effective Alzheimer’s vaccine may be developed using dominant helper cell epitopes such as PADRE® that will alleviate the side effects observed with earlier Abeta vaccines.

The Abeta peptide is believed to have a central role in the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Pharmexa, in collaboration with H. Lundbeck, as well as other pharmaceutical and biotech companies, has therefore been targeting the Abeta peptide for a therapeutic Alzheimer’s vaccine.