PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- Anti-cancer drug paclitaxel, or Paxceed, reportedly reduced adverse effects of Alzheimer's disease-like pathology in mice during a preclinical U.S. trial.
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers showed Paxceed helps correct the problems caused by clumped tau proteins in the nerve cells of mice.
"Our hope is that microtubule-stabilizing drugs could be used to treat Alzheimer's and other related diseases," says Dr. John Trojanowski.
"These are proteins that we all have in our brains and, as long as they stay soluble and properly folded, there's no disease," he said. "When these misfolded proteins aggregate and form sheets called fibrils that accumulate in different parts of the brain, that's when things go awry."
Paxceed shows therapeutic promise for diseases involving brain amyloids, according to Trojanowski.
The study appears in Monday's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.