By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter


Lee Jung-hee Rhu Hoon

South Korean scientists have made back-to-back breakthroughs in fighting against Alzheimer’s disease, one of the hardest-to-heal degenerative disorders.
Professor Rhu Hoon and Lee Jung-hee of Boston University said Tuesday that the husband-and-wife research team identified the protective mechanism of brain cells against outside attacks.

``We learned that a protein, called CREB, and mitochondria produce defensive genes that shield brain cells from oxidative stress, a main cause of various neural diseases like Alzheimer’s,’’ Rhu said.

``We are searching for ways to spur the activities of CREB and mitochondria to effectively prevent the development of brain diseases.’’

Their compatriot Kim Sang-uk, professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology, uncovered an amino acid earlier this week, called glycine zipper, which activates dementia-causing abnormal proteins.

``We found a killer of brain cells, the trigger of Alzheimer’s, while the Boston University team discovered how brain cells protect themselves against the killer,’’ Kim said.

``The two methods are disparate in beginning. But both have the identical purpose of blocking the development of Alzheimer’s.’’

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common case of senile dementia and has characteristics of intellectual deterioration and declining activities in daily living.

The most outstanding early symptom is memory loss and it seems like just a minor forgetfulness but the illness causes more and more memory blackouts and eventually leads to death.

According to a recent survey, about 21 percent of Koreans living in rural areas and aged 60 or more suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease explained 63 percent of the cases.

In the United States, roughly half of residents aged 85 or more are believed to get the illness.

The disease occurs when oxidative stress removes brain cells, which cannot be regenerated once they are destroyed. This means today’s anti-Alzheimer’s drugs cannot resurrect moribund cells and patients cannot return to the status before they caught the disorder.

``For now, our experiments is aimed at just preventing Alzheimer’s or stopping further development of the disease. A miracle therapy for dementia will be realized by only stem cell research,’’ Kim said.

He added that in the future, doctors would inject brain cells cultured outside human bodies into the brain to replace already-dead cells, thus curing Alzheimer’s disease completely.

The stem cell research is also being spearheaded by Koreans, such as cloning king Hwang Woo-suk at Seoul National University and his colleagues.

Hwang stole the global show in early 2003 by extracting a stem cell line, the parent cells that can divide into any human cells or organs, from cloned embryos.

Earlier this year, he advanced a step further by establishing a total of 11 stem cell batches after cloning somatic cells from individuals with critical diseases or disabilities.

The bottom line of the attention-grabbing research is that scientists will be able to nurture organs and tissues to implant them back to somatic cell donors without causing any immune responses.

Because the organs and tissues were differentiated from the cloned somatic cells of an individual, they are 100 percent compatible with the cell donor.

Hwang has refused to definitively put a time frame on when stem cell therapies would be applied in practice, but has said it could take at least 10 years.

voc200@koreatimes.co.kr