alt Hacker NewsThey mean the fake Alzheimer's they induce by injecting poison into 3 month old animals or which develops in mice genetically engineered to have diseases that aren't Alzheimer's but are somewhat similar to Alzheimer's in some ways, not the kind where you wait 70 years for a human to develop which they don't even really understand what causes it.
Replies
gus_massa • yesterday at 4:00 PM
Agree. As far as I remember, mice don't get real Alzheimer, so they only have a model that is somewhat similar.
Let's hope the cure can be transfered to humans, but I think the chances are extremly low.
timcobb • yesterday at 4:08 PM
Yeah, we got it!
> the fake Alzheimer's they induce ....
I used to work with a guy who had been a scientist at a large pharma company (we were both working at a small biotech start-up at the time).
He told me an interesting story... basically, scientists at his company would get an extra year-end bonus if they had worked on a drug candidate that made it past animal studies and into human (clinical) trials.
He told me that one way to 'consistently' get the extra bonus was to work on candidate drugs for neurological diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's, etc.) because ... the animal models for those diseases were (generally) dog shit, so it was easy to find a drug that 'cured' whatever happened to be your neurological disease of interest in mice/rats/etc.
Then you get your bonus and the drug fails in humans.
Lather, rinse, repeat.