Alzheimer's mouse shows degradation

While its anyone's guess as to who has built the better mouse for Alzheimer's disease, Scios Nova Inc. and partner Marion Merrell Dow are the first to publish statistically significant behavioral deficits in such animals that parallel human dementia.

As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mice developed by the Mountain View, Calif., company, expressing the gene for the 751-amino acid isoform of the human beta-amyloid precursor protein (β-APP), had deficits in certain behavioral tests at 12 months of age that were not apparent at six months of age. The mice therefore model the progressive impairment in learning and memory that is the hallmark of the human disease, the companies' researchers concluded...