TOMMorrow's AD marker

Since its discovery as an Alzheimer's disease risk factor in the early 1990s, mutations in APOE have been implicated in up to 50% of AD cases. Now, the researcher who first detected APOE's role in AD is touting a new theory: he points to APOE's immediate chromosomal neighbor, the gene for a mitochondrial protein called TOMM40, as a key contributor to the neurodegenerative disease.

Allen Roses, director of the Deane Drug Discovery Institute at Duke University, presented his TOMM40 (translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 40 homolog) findings at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease (ICAD) in Vienna in July. Although the work has not yet been published, Roses is already heading a company, Zinfandel Pharmaceuticals Inc., which plans to commercialize the discovery...