Cognition Therapeutics identifies key proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease

Cognition Therapeutics announced that collaborators at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland published findings in the journal, Acta Neuropathologica, that provide new insight into the biology of Alzheimer’s disease that is consistent with our understanding of the role the -2 receptor has in regulating Abeta oligomer binding. Using a combination of two high-resolution microscopy techniques: array tomography and Forster resonance energy transfer, Professor Tara Spires-Jones and colleagues at the UK Dementia Research Institute at University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences analyzed protein-protein interactions in over 1 million individual synapses in brain samples from people who had died with Alzheimer’s disease. Results detected TMEM97, a protein component of the -2 receptor complex, in close proximity to cellular prion protein on Alzheimer’s brain synapses. In addition, results found that Abeta oligomers were proximate to both PrPc, which has been shown to bind Abeta oligomers in neuronal cultures, as well as to TMEM97. These findings support the hypothesis that these receptor proteins may form a complex on the synapse surface with Abeta oligomers binding to one or both proteins.