In the pursuit of dangerous clumps
Thursday, July 28, 2011 - 09:01
in Health & Medicine
When normal proteins form protein clumps in the body, then alarm bells start ringing. Such clumps, called "amyloids," are closely associated with Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes, formerly called adult-onset diabetes. If doctors knew how these proteins form clumps, then they might be able to treat such diseases more efficiently. The physicist Adrian Keller and his colleagues at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and the university in Aarhus, Denmark, have succeeded in taking a major step in that direction.