Race to ID Alzheimer’s Treatments

Credit: Pixabay

In a major scientific discovery, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have discovered a pair of already FDA-approved drugs that can both slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and reverse it, restoring memory in lab mice.

This is simply the latest breakthrough in a series of promising studies and experiments that have found potential treatments for the degenerative condition.

Published  in the medical journal Cell at the end of July, the researchers used the Connectivity Map, a database of 1,300 medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), searching for already known and tested medications that could reverse the effects of the disease. This narrowed down their search to a short list of five medications, before researchers zeroed in on two cancer drugs.

Marina Sirota, interim director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, explained “Alzheimer’s disease comes with complex changes to the brain, which has made it tough to study and treat, but our computational tools opened up the possibility of tackling the complexity directly.”

Those two drugs, letrozole and irinotecan, are both used to treat a variety of cancers. Letrozole, known by its brand name Femara, is an aromatase inhibitor used to treat certain types of breast cancer. For women, it works by reducing the amount of estrogen in the body in order to prevent the spread of breast cancer cells.

 Irinotecan, also known as Camptosar, is a chemotherapy drug used to treat colorectal, pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer, among others. It blocks cancer cell replication.

The researchers studied the medical records of 1.4 million patients and found that those who had taken either of these two medicines were significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

The UCSF team proceeded to give a laboratory mouse with an aggressive case of Alzheimer’s both drugs and found that it prevented brain degeneration and reversed changes caused by Alzheimer’s, restoring memory in the mouse.

According to Yadong Huang, yet another professor of neurology and pathology at UCSF, “Alzheimer’s is likely the result of numerous alterations in many genes and proteins that, together, disrupt brain health.”

The fact that both of these medications are already approved by the FDA for treating other diseases could speed up the process to begin human trials. However, repurposing the cancer drugs to address Alzheimer’s will be complex.

Meanwhile, after spending ten years studying mice, researchers at Harvard Medical School found that lithium in depletion in the brain could be a significant cause of Alzheimer’s. That element occurs naturally in the brain much like the way other elements, such as iron, are found in and play vital roles in the human body. Lithium plays an important role in the brain, shielding it from degeneration.

The findings, published in the journal Nature earlier in August 2025, found that lithium loss in the brain serves one of the earliest markers of Alzheimer’s. Senior author, Professor Bruce Yanker, MD, explained that “The idea that lithium deficiency could be a cause of Alzheimer’s disease is new and suggests a different therapeutic approach.”

Alzheimer’s involves multiple abnormalities that occur in the proteins within our brains.  The researchers hope that lithium could be the key to finally developing treatments for the disease in its entirety.

In the experiments with lab mice, feeding the rodents lithium-rich diets was able to reverse Alzheimer’s-related damage, and restore memory function.

Other major university studies have also found promising potential treatments.

A study published in the journal Antioxidants by the Scripps Research Institute and the University of California San Diego found that carnosic acid, a compound found in the simple garden herbs rosemary and sage and long incorporated into hair loss treatments, could reverse memory loss and reduce brain inflammation in mice.

Yet another study from Stanford Medical School discovered that senior citizens who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia over the following seven years in comparison to those who did not receive the vaccine.

All these research breakthroughs send a message of hope to the countless American families dealing with the debilitating consequences of Alzheimer’s.