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Alzheimer's disease: where are we up to?

Published on August 26, 2010 Updated on October 31, 2017   43 min

A selection of talks on Neurology

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0:00
My name is John Hardy, and I'm a professor at the UCL Institute of Neurology in London. And my group works on the genetic analysis of Alzheimer's disease. And this has been an area in which there has been a lot of work over the last five years. And the power of genetic analysis has increased over this period, too. So, we're now making a lot of findings in this disease area. However, the utility of genetic analysis is becoming questioned, because we have not yet developed therapies for the disease. And so, the promise of genetic analysis has been that, by understanding the genes for the disease, we would be able to develop therapies. And so far, that has not been the case. And in this lecture, I'm both going to talk about the genetic analysis and the findings that have been made, and also discuss why there have been problems in getting to therapies. So by the end of the lecture, I hope you have an understanding of where genetic analysis is, and how I hope that things will move in the future.
1:15
So, we live in a time where because of the power of genetic analysis, we have many many genes for diseases in general; not just Alzheimer's disease, but in all diseases for which there has been extensive genetic analysis, we're now finding many genes for those diseases. And our intention is to map these genes into pathways for disease, and to use this understanding of pathways to develop therapeutics.

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