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Article: LEFT-END PLAY AIMS TO CLOBBER PLAQUES, TANGLES JAPANESE-U.S. TEAM CHECKS OUT NEPRILYSIN ENZYME THAT NIPS BETA- AMYLOID, ALZHEIMER TOXIN, IN BUD.
- Article from:
- BIOWORLD Today
- Article date:
- May 25, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 A Thomson Healthcare Company. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A new player has pulled up a chair in the cutthroat card game of Alzheimer's disease (AD). It's a natural enzyme that goes by the name of neprilysin - alias neutral zinc metalloendopeptidase.
"What neprilysin does in the mammalian body," observed cell and molecular biologist Norma Gerard, at Harvard Medical School in Boston, "is degrade relatively small, often insoluble peptides into smaller, soluble dipeptides. I was just looking through a literature search of Alzheimer's disease some years ago," Gerard recalled, "and came up with a number of reports not of neprilysin specifically but of antagonists to that enzyme as inhibiting the degradation of toxic beta ...