Yousef al-Abed, chief of medicinal chemistry at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, designs medicines by creating novel molecular compounds.

In his latest work, al-Abed was looking for a way to target the amyloid plaques that clump together between neurons in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers discovered the medicine, CNI-14493, can transform amyloid into a form that doesn't aggregate to form plaques in the brain and also neutralizes the toxicity of the amyloid.

Al-Abed, along with Michael Bacher and Richard Dodel of Marburg University in Germany, found the amyloid burden in the brain was reduced by 70 percent to 85 percent in areas hard hit in Alzheimer's patients -- the cortex and the hippocampus.

"It's very exciting," said al-Abed. "Developing medicines is like doing a puzzle. You stare at it and gamble. Then you test it and if you are lucky you succeed. We were lucky."

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.