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Alzheimer's therapy: a BACE in the hand?

Nature Medicine volume 17, pages 932–933 (2011)Cite this article

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Sam Gandy

Recently, in a tour-de-force duo of papers, Ryan Watts and colleagues have delivered advances in the two diverse areas of BACE inhibition and therapeutic delivery of biologicals across the BBB1,2. First, they described a neutralizing antibody against BACE1 with powerful Aβ-lowering actions1. This is especially welcome, as pharmacological BACE inhibition, long stymied by the challenges presented by its large catalytic site, has not yet survived a phase 1 randomized human clinical trial. In addition, an antibody-based approach typically has the advantage of much greater specificity than that of small molecules. Delivery to the CNS would normally be a potential roadblock, but the authors circumvent this in their second paper by exploiting a transcytosis motif, thus enhancing delivery of BACE1-specific antibody across the BBB2.

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Competing interests

S.G. is a grantee from Amicus Pharmaceuticals and a data and safety monitoring board member of Pfizer/Johnson&Johnson Alzheimer Immunotherapy Alliance.

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Alzheimer's therapy: a BACE in the hand?. Nat Med 17, 932–933 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0811-932

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