Would drugs used to treat Alzheimer's be useful to treat myeloma or amyloidosis?

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What drugs used to treat Alzheimer's be useful to treat myeloma or amyloidosis?

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The answer is probably not. And the reason for that is that, as you're alluding to in Alzheimer's disease, we can often see amyloid protein in those plaques in the brain. So if they do brain biopsies or autopsies on people who have passed away from Alzheimer's, you can look in the brain tissues that are affected and see a little deposits of amyloid in there.

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But this gets at the fact that

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amyloidosis is sort of a convergence of different pathophysiology, meaning kind of different disease biology

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that are related but totally different. And what I mean by that is that the amyloidosis that we can see that forms in the heart and somebody with light chain amyloidosis, it'll light up on that Congo red test that we used to stain for amyloidosis, just as the brain will on somebody who has Alzheimer's disease.

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But those proteins are coming from completely different places and in Alzheimer's that it has something to do with kind of tangling plaques and different proteins that stick there and form the amyloidosis

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as opposed to in light chain amyloidosis, where it's plasma cells and light chain proteins that are in the blood that then stick in. Let's say the heart and form that amyloidosis protein.

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So when we do the stain, it looks the same. But in terms of where it's coming from, it's completely different. And even the composition of that actual amyloid protein is different, even though it's structured sort of similarly, which leads to all of it staining positively by that Congo red test. But as a result, the diseases are separate enough that it's probably not going to work to use

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Alzheimer's drugs in treating light chain amyloidosis or vice versa.

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But there is interest in using some of these proteins or drugs that can degrade amyloidosis to say, okay, can they cross subtypes? And some of these seem like they probably could, meaning drugs that are being developed to target light chain amyloidosis could also possibly have some activity in other types of amyloidosis, also not Alzheimer's, but other subtypes of amyloidosis and research going on in those fields.

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Also. So it's an interesting field, but right now there's not too much crossover between them.