Alzheimer’s disease is an extremely devastating neurodegenerative disorder that is the number one cause of dementia in patients over the age of 65. Most research on Alzheimer’s disease has focused on treating the later stage symptoms of the illness. Using antibody treatments, scientists have been even able to almost eliminate the aggregates of proteins that tend to form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. However, this has not been able to halt the progression of the disease. This study aims to explore a promising new avenue of viewing the causation of Alzheimer’s disease that can potentially be applied towards diagnosing this illness during its early stages and conquering it once and for all. I created this video as a summary of my research for the Google Science Fair. If you thought that this concept was interesting, please comment or vote for my project. Thanks!

Dr. Aisen, director of the National Institute on Aging Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, talks about new studies with recent advances in how we understand immunotherapies for Alzheimer’s disease.

This movie shows the crystal structures of fibril-forming segments of yeast prion protein Sup35 and Alzheimer’s amyloid-beta protein(2OMM.pdb and 2ONV.pdb). The structure is termed cross-beta spines made of a pair of beta-sheets forming steric zipper (Sawaya et al. Nature vol. 447, 453).

Professor Kenneth Kosik discusses neurofibrillary tangles, which form inside a cell and are made up of a protein called tau. There is a strong relationship with plaques and amyloid deposition.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have reversed Alzheimers-like symptoms in mouse models of the disease with injections of neural stem cells. The first author, Mathew Blurton-Jones, has a Training grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The lead author, Frank LaFerla, has a SEED grant and an Early Translational grant from CIRM.

www.alzheimers.org.uk This film looks at what happens to a brain with Alzheimer’s disease, including the development of amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. The dementia brain tour is a free educational video resource that includes chapters on the brain and how brain cells function, Alzheimer’s disease, Posterior Cortical Atrophy, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, fronto-temporal dementia and other rarer causes of dementia. The narrator is Dr Anne Corbett, Research Communications Officer at Alzheimer’s Society, whose brief is to ensure that dementia research is communicated in a clear and accessible way. To download a transcript of all of the Dementia Brain Tour, please go to http If you have found this tool useful please consider donating to our research programme by following this link www.alzheimers.org.ukThere are more than 750000 people in the UK affected by dementia with numbers set to rise to 1 million by 2021. More than half of these have Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s Society is the UK’s leading care and research charity for people with dementia and those who care for them. Support the fight against dementia www.alzheimers.org.uk

This movie describes the development of Alzheimer’s disease at a molecular level. It shows the very important role of the amyloid-beta peptides in the generation of deadly plaques in the brain. It is proposed by the research of professor Patrick C. Fraering who is head of the laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Alzheimer’s Disease at the Life Science department and Brain Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne – EPFL. Professor Patrick Fraering’s lab website is at: fraering-lab.epfl.ch The graphics and sound engineering is done by the Visualbiotech team with help of its rendering and simulation system called BioInspire. Visualbiotech engineers: Pablo de Heras Ciechomski Robin Mange website: www.visualbiotech.ch Music is composed by Kevin Macleod incompetech.com We hope you learned something new!