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The discovery of natural antibodies against beta-amyloid, the major component of the plaques that characterise Alzheimer’s disease, is a promising suggestion as to the potential effectiveness of a relatively straightforward immunotherapy.

Affibodies are artificial, antibody-like proteins generated through protein engineering techniques. ZAβ3, an affibody that targets amyloid-beta (Abeta), has been shown to prevent plaque formation and neurotoxicity in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. Affibodies like ZAβ3 might have important practical advantages over antibody-based Abeta-clearing agents, making this a promising new approach.

Widespread optimism about the life-extension potential of calorie restriction (CR) is tempered by doubt that any significant number of people will ever adopt it as a lifestyle. However, thus far the search for “CR mimetics” – drugs that convey the same benefits on a normal calorie intake – has been fruitless. Here we review some of the prominent examples.

Unlike mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs), human ESCs are highly prone to death after enzymatic dissociation from a growing cell cluster; as a result, researchers are forced to rely on far more laborious methods for their expansion. New research at the Scripps Institute has revealed the molecular basis for this frustrating limitation, and also uncovered two small-molecule drugs able to greatly improve the cells’ survival.

Immunotherapeutic clearance of beta-amyloid is the preferred regenerative medicine approach to the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but existing attempts to develop such therapies have been fraught with side-effects and limited efficacy, as well as concerns about clinical translatability. A new approach using DNA vaccines is showing great promise, and has the potential to be safe and cheap enough for deployment in pre-clinical AD – before any irreversible memory loss can occur.