Potential Connection Between Dementia and Cancer

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Fruit Fly Reveals A Potential Connection Between Dementia And Cancer

Main Category: Cancer/Oncology News

Article Date: 13 Feb 2006 - 0:00am (UK)

By expressing a protein associated with Alzheimer's disease in the

brain of the fruit fly, researchers have demonstrated an intriguing

link between neuronal death and proteins previously associated with

cancer.

The findings are reported by Vik Khurana, Mel Feany, and colleagues

from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the

Burnham Institute.

Neurons in the brain generally do not divide. It is therefore

perplexing that in Alzheimer's disease, and other dementias

associated with a protein called tau, dying neurons actually re-

express proteins normally seen during cell division or in cancer. It

has previously been unclear whether such cell-division proteins cause

neuronal death, protect neurons from death, or are irrelevant.

In the present work, the researchers used a fruit-fly model of

Alzheimer's disease to examine the relationship of cell-division

proteins to neurodegeneration. The power of this model, which

recapitulates key features of the human disease, lies in the ability

to use genetic tools to establish a causal connection between a

molecular pathway and neuronal death. Khurana and colleagues found

that, as in human disease, abnormal expression of cell-cycle proteins

accompanied neuronal death in their fly model. Most importantly, loss

of neurons could be prevented when the cell cycle was genetically

blocked or when flies were fed anticancer drugs. Cell-cycle

activation depended upon a hyperactive cell growth molecule, TOR

(target of rapamycin), also known to be abnormally activated in

Alzheimer's disease. By establishing these causal connections, this

study suggests that anticancer drugs are potential therapies for

Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. More broadly, the results

point to an intriguing connection between cancer and dementia, two of

the most important diseases in the elderly.

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The researchers include Vikram Khurana, Yiran Lu, L.

Steinhilb, M. Shulman, and Mel B. Feany of the Brigham and

Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA;

Oldham of The Burnham Institute in La Jolla, CA. This work was

supported by Fulbright, H.C.N.R., and American Australian

Association/Merck Foundation Fellowships to V.K., and by NIH

(AG88001, AG19790) and McKnight Foundation grants to M.B.F.

Khurana et al.: " TOR-Mediated Cell-Cycle Activation Causes

Neurodegeneration in a Drosophila Tauopathy Model. " Publishing in

Current Biology 16, 230-241, February 7, 2006. DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2005.12.042. www.current-biology.comhttp://www.current-

biology.com/