Advanced diagnostics and therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer disease is the most common cause of dementia in the world. Despite intensive research efforts, no cure is available yet. In this thesis, a therapeutic approach using antibodies was investigated. These antibodies target a protein called amyloidβ, which plays a central role in the disease process. While this approach has been tried before, it has met with very little success so far, and there is still room for improvement. In this research antibodies were developed and tested that cause less inflammation than normal antibodies and thereby less side-effects in an animal model of Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, these new type of antibodies did not perform better than the previous type. It was also investigated whether antibodies could be used to diagnose the disease using PET imaging. It was shown that antibodies in mice are promising to diagnose the disease and to gain further knowledge about how antibodies might be used to combat the disease.