Science Spotlight: New ways to attack β-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s

Two recent studies suggest Alzheimer’s disease may be treatable by actively clearing β-amyloid, rather than relying on passive anti-β-amyloid mAbs: one engineered astrocytes to express CARs that engulf plaques, while the other used bispecific peptides to shuttle β-amyloid into cells for lysosomal degradation.

A team led by Marco Colonna at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis engineered chimeric antigen receptor-expressing astrocytes (CAR As) by fusing an anti-β-amyloid single-chain variable fragment (scFv) to the intracellular phagocytic domains of receptors such as MEGF10 and DECTIN1...