A drug currently being used as treatment for cancer has been found to help sharpen memory in an animal study. The drug called RGFP966 holds potentials in helping sufferers of dementia.
Kasia Bieszczad, from Rutgers University and colleagues administered the cancer drug to rats and found that the treatment made the animals more attuned to what they hear. It also appeared to have sharpened the rats' ability to store more information and develop connections that made it possible for these memories to be transferred between the brain cells.
Bieszczad said that in neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, memory making is typically poor or absent once the patient is already in the advanced stages of the condition. The researcher added that the drug has the potential to make new memories vivid even in worst cases.
The synapses responsible for transferring information from one neuron to the other are already weak and are no longer stable in patients suffering from dementia so their brain cells shrink and die. Unfortunately, no treatment is currently available to reverse this.
Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and typically affects older people 60 years old and above. The U.S. currently has up to 5.3 million cases of the disease but the number is expected to more than double come 2050 due to an aging population.
RGFP966, which could possibly reverse this condition belongs to a class of drugs called HDAC inhibitors, which are currently used in cancer treatments.
The drug improves the plasticity of the neurons, which results in the brain being able to make better connections and produce beneficial changes that improve the memory.
For the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Sept. 23, Bieszczad and colleagues taught the rats to listen to a particular sound. They found that the animals that were given the drug remembered what they learned and were more able to respond correctly to the sound at a greater extent compared with those that did not receive the drug.
They were also more "tuned in" to relevant acoustic signals that they listened to during the training, which according to the researchers is important since setting up the brain to process and store significant sounds is crucial to language and speech.
Bieszczad said that hypersensitivity in how auditory information is processed enabled the nerve cells to reorganize and come up with new pathways, which allows for more of the information learned to become long-term memory.
"We provide evidence of an epigenetic mechanism for information processing," the researchers wrote in their study. "We propose that HDACs control "informational capture" at a systems level for what and how much information is encoded by gating sensory cortical plasticity that underlies the sensory richness of newly formed memories."
Photo: Allan Ajifo | Flickr
