400th CIRM-funded paper: Genes, stem cells and Alzheimer’s disease
400th CIRM-funded paper: Genes, stem cells and Alzheimer’s disease
The 400th paper published with CIRM funding also marks the five-year anniversary of the first CIRM board meeting (the actual date was December 17, 2004). The paper, by researchers at the Gladstone Institute and the University of California, San Francisco, illustrates how far the field has come in the five years since the organization’s inception, and in the three years since the organization has been funding research.
The paper reveals why people with a particular gene variant called ApoE4 are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and identifies possible drug treatments to block the effects of that gene variant. The gene ApoE makes a protein that is involved in lipid metabolism and neuronal repair and remodeling. As with all genes, people can inherit different variants, and each variant makes a slightly different protein.