frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Alzheimer's can be reversed to achieve full neurological recovery in animals

https://case.edu/news/new-study-shows-alzheimers-disease-can-be-reversed-achieve-full-neurological-recovery-not-just-prevented-or-slowed-animal-models
203•thunderbong•2h ago

Comments

A_D_E_P_T•2h ago
The authors report that restoring NAD+ balance in the brain -- using a compound called P7C3-A20 -- completely reversed Alzheimer's pathology and recovered cognitive function in two different transgenic mouse models (one amyloid-based, one tau-based). The mice had advanced disease before treatment began.

Three comments:

- You can actually buy the drug here: https://focusbiomolecules.com/p7c3-a20-nampt-activator-prone... It's a simple small molecule. If this stuff works, expect it to be everywhere within just a couple of years.

- There's room for skepticism. As Derek Lowe once wrote: "Alzheimer's therapies have, for the most part, been a cliff over which people push bales of money. There are plenty of good reasons for this: we don't really know what the cause of Alzheimer's is, when you get down to it, and we're the only animal that we know of that gets it. Mouse models of the disease would be extremely useful – you wouldn't even have to know what the problem was to do some sort of phenotypic screen – but the transgenic mice used for these experiments clearly don't recapitulate the human disease. The hope for the last 25 years or so has been that they'd be close enough to get somewhere, but look where we are."

> https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/just-how-worthless...

- If the drug's mechanism of action has been correctly assigned, it's very plausible that simply supplementing with NMN, NR, or NADH would work equally well. The authors caution against this on, IMO, extremely shaky and unjustified grounds. "Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer."

bossyTeacher•1h ago
> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer.

Does this mean that people are having to trade Alzheimer in exchange for high risk of cancer? Or does this mean that we need better precursors that don't require that trade off?

juujian•1h ago
It's a quality of life vs years left calculation you have to make on a case by case basis.
mmooss•48m ago
You can't make calculations without data, and in this case you have none: we have no idea of the effects on humans.
shawnz•1h ago
Keep reading:

> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.

luma•1h ago
I think it means one should read the very next sentence:

> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.

A_D_E_P_T•1h ago
There's no good evidence that supplementation with NMN, NR, etc. increases the risk of cancer in healthy people. There's some speculation that it might be risky for people with cancer to take those supplements, but the picture is far from clear. Some papers even suggest that they can be beneficial. (e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177531/ )

In terms of risk-benefit analysis, if this stuff actually cures Alzheimer's, then even a 10x increased risk of cancer (all types) is acceptable, as Alzheimer's is frequently a fate worse than death whereas cancer can be managed whilst keeping your personality and sanity intact. In reality, the increased risk of cancer from something like NMN is perhaps 1.005x. To all appearances, totally negligible.

The problem, for Pieper, is that NMN/NR/NADH are ubiquitous and cost pennies per dose. So, if they work (big if), this new research is unmonetizable. The team leads would win a Nobel Prize, but Big Pharma gigabucks are out of the question. Let's see what happens.

nkmnz•17m ago
Could explain how a compound that's already on the market and has been patented for (some) medical use at least once in 2015 (expiring 2035) might make a good case for "Big Pharma gigabucks"? I thought one reason for a lack of research into "repurposablity" of existing small molecule drugs is the fact that new applications cannot be independently patented?
FooBarWidget•4m ago
Furthermore, we don't even know whether NAD precursor supplementation works. They raise intracellular NAD+ levels, but unclear whether they raise intercellular NAD+, which is what really matters. There are also those that say NAD+ recycling matters more than we think, and precursors don't address that.
mmooss•55m ago
It means we have no idea if this would work or how it would work, and discussing it as a treatment for humans is badly mistaken.
Palomides•1h ago
>expect it to be everywhere within just a couple of years.

there are studies about this compound from a decade ago, kinda doubt it's going to be a breakthrough at this point

hnlmorg•55m ago
> and we're the only animal that we know of that gets it.

Is this actually true? I thought it was pretty common for elderly pets

xenospn•44m ago
Elderly pets have loss of cognitive function/memory, but I don't think it's the same disease.
anonym29•2m ago
What's the quantifiable difference between memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer's?
mmooss•49m ago
> There's room for skepticism.

And there's room for thinking there's water in the ocean. We have no idea whether this would work at all or how it would work at all in humans. We have one experiment in mice, which as you say can't have Alzheimer's.

This is a nice step, like developments in fusion energy. That's part of research, and let's hope and investigate it, but it's absurd to think about it as anything but a science project right now.

thisislife2•3m ago
And the author of the paper has disclosed that they have patent on the drug being tested. Let's see if the results can be reproduced by others. Then let's see how it tests with humans.
ltbarcly3•1h ago
They mean the fake Alzheimer's they induce by injecting poison into 3 month old animals or which develops in mice genetically engineered to have diseases that aren't Alzheimer's but are somewhat similar to Alzheimer's in some ways, not the kind where you wait 70 years for a human to develop which they don't even really understand what causes it.
gus_massa•1h ago
Agree. As far as I remember, mice don't get real Alzheimer, so they only have a model that is somewhat similar.

Let's hope the cure can be transfered to humans, but I think the chances are extremly low.

timcobb•1h ago
Yeah, we got it!
jtrn•1h ago
This is totally improper reporting of the study.

When enough words, framing, and unstated important premises are omitted, it crosses over from the realm of incomplete or misleading into plain outright lying in my worldview.

They claim "Reverses advanced AD in mice." What they did is reverse symptoms in genetic models.

They claim to "Restore NAD+ homeostasis," ignoring that NAD might not even be causally related to Alzheimer’s, just a side effect. It’s like saying we cured a house fire because we efficiently removed the ashes after the fire. It’s the Tau thing all over again.

The claim: "Conservative molecular signatures" when in reality, 5xFAD mice are poor predictors of human clinical success to such a degree that it’s statistically more common for mice studies to NOT transfer to human biology than to do so.

They also make unsupported claims like "Safer than NAD+ precursors (supplements)," when this is a pre-clinical assumption. No human toxicity trials are mentioned in this context, and there are always MASSIVE differences when switching to real human studies. It might be correct, but there’s no basis to say that based on this study.

Also, the senior author owns the company. The paper has the hallmarks of a "pitch deck" for the drug.

In short, it seems to me that the claim of "Full Neurological Recovery" is misleading to patients. It fails to prove that fixing NAD+ in humans will stop the disease, only that it works in mice engineered to have the disease, and only by assuming that their specific measure is a 1-to-1 with the clinical presentation of the disease. The results are likely the "best case scenario" presented to support the commercialization of P7C3-A20.

Here is the COMMON SENSE question peer-reviews should have asked. Is low NAD+ the fire, or just the ashes?

Why should we believe this works in humans when the last 500 'cures' in 5xFAD mice failed?

Are you regrowing a brain, or just cleaning up a dirty one?

How does one molecule fix five unconnected problems simultaneously? The Context: The drug fixed inflammation, blood-brain barrier, amyloid/tau (protein folding), and memory (neuronal signaling). Drugs rarely hit four distinct biological systems with 100% success....

Where is the toxicology report that proves 'safer than supplements'?

briandw•57m ago
Boosting NAD has a been the focus of taking NMN supplements. Seems like NMN is a dud for boosting NAD. I wonder if P7C3-A20 can be used instead?
jadbox•42m ago
"Seems like NMN is a dud for boosting NAD" what gives you that notion?
beckerdo•35m ago
It's a useful discovery. The real proof and utility is if what they learned from "mouse-heimer's" can be applied to human Alzheimer's.
7thpower•10m ago
This is great news for mice who have something vaguely similar to Alzheimer’s.

Automation and Validation

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/24/automation-and-validation/
1•ibobev•29s ago•0 comments

BP sells stake in motor oil arm Castrol for $6B

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93wekx37g4o
1•dangalf•2m ago•0 comments

T-Ruby is Ruby with syntax for types

https://type-ruby.github.io/
1•graypegg•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I created a tool to generate handwritten signatures

https://signcraft.pro/
2•nedoto•4m ago•0 comments

Roots of milk drinking revealed by South Asian genomes

https://www.science.org/content/article/roots-milk-drinking-revealed-south-asian-genomes
1•bikenaga•4m ago•0 comments

What you eat could decide the planet's future

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/12/251224032356.htm
1•rhollos•5m ago•0 comments

Disprove or agree with my take on the future (comment or post)

https://twitter.com/jimsbr/status/2004236990716186856
1•usernameisjim•6m ago•1 comments

The Owl, the Scientific Method, and Claude Code

https://vsevolod.net/claude-debug/
2•murkt•7m ago•0 comments

Christmas – But I Wanted to Program

https://number-garden-alive.netlify.app/?9333037093851
1•cpuXguy•11m ago•1 comments

Sierra Christmas Card 1986: A Computer Christmas

https://archive.org/details/sierra-christmas-card-1986
1•jdkee•12m ago•0 comments

Building your own RAM is as 'easy' as sourcing memory modules and soldering them

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/russian-enthusiasts-are-building-their-own-ddr5-r...
1•thisislife2•13m ago•0 comments

Lessons from 120 DevTools Interviews

https://scalingdevtools.com/newsletter/18085111
1•mooreds•13m ago•0 comments

Select2 – The jQuery replacement for select boxes

https://select2.org/
1•thunderbong•16m ago•0 comments

RustToolsGDB

https://codeberg.org/laladrik/RustToolsGDB
1•laladrik•19m ago•1 comments

Show HN: nunchux – A handy tmux launcher buddy thing

https://github.com/datamadsen/nunchux
1•tmadsen_•21m ago•0 comments

The first web browser was released on this day in 1990

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
1•firefax•23m ago•0 comments

The vibe and the verifier: breaking through scientific barriers with AI

https://renormalize.substack.com/p/the-vibe-and-the-verifier-breaking
2•getnormality•24m ago•0 comments

Facebook Museum-Bringing the End Closer Together

https://networkcultures.org/blog/2025/12/24/facebook-museum/
1•glovink•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Gift for Kids – Live Santa AI Video Call

https://callsantatonight.com/christmas-gift-for-kids-santa-ai-video-call
2•s-stude•29m ago•0 comments

Donald Knuth's 2025 Christmas lecture: the Knight's Tours

https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2025-christmas-lecture-the-knights-tours/
4•MilnerRoute•31m ago•0 comments

The Mammoth Pirates – In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush

https://www.rferl.org/a/the-mammoth-pirates/27939865.html
2•ece20•32m ago•0 comments

DIY E-Reader Folds Open Like a Book

https://hackaday.com/2025/12/24/diy-e-reader-folds-open-like-a-book/
1•elashri•34m ago•0 comments

Free Speech in Tucson

https://yousaytoday.com/story/3ab31ff0-d955-408a-851d-ac77a9d7c23d
2•mvcalder•35m ago•2 comments

From shoreline to skyscraper: Seashells offer a path to low-carbon concrete

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-shoreline-skyscraper-seashells-path-carbon.html
1•PaulHoule•36m ago•0 comments

Available domain names for your next project

https://sneakydomains.com/freebies/pn1y89xgpnmvwdd
4•starf1sh•40m ago•0 comments

Why do we hear the same Christmas songs year after year?

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5637477
2•mooreds•40m ago•1 comments

Observability dashboard for an arbitrary LLM langgraph

https://github.com/xbt-a4224j/langgraph-observer
1•mooreds•41m ago•0 comments

AI #148: Christmas Break

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-148-christmas-break
1•paulpauper•42m ago•0 comments

All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/11/06/all-over-the-rich-world-fewer-people-are-hooking-up...
2•paulpauper•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I treated my brain like a buggy server and wrote a patch (Shi-Mo Model)

https://github.com/317317317apple-a11y/shi-mo-protocol/blob/main/README.md
6•ShiMo_Protocol•45m ago•1 comments