Well, I think we also know that inflammation in the brain is a major component of Alzheimer’s disease in addition to the amyloid plaques and the neurofibrillary tangles. So there are cells in the brain called microglial cells. They are the innate immune cells of the brain and they play a significant role in Alzheimer’s disease. And so we’re learning more and more about the function and the role of these microglial cells...
Well, I think we also know that inflammation in the brain is a major component of Alzheimer’s disease in addition to the amyloid plaques and the neurofibrillary tangles. So there are cells in the brain called microglial cells. They are the innate immune cells of the brain and they play a significant role in Alzheimer’s disease. And so we’re learning more and more about the function and the role of these microglial cells. And what we’re doing is focusing on them because they really go in and they remove the amyloid from the brain. They’re sort of like, you know, the trash collectors of the brain. They go around looking for damage, looking for junk. They recognize the amyloid as junk. They try to remove it, but they’re not very good at it. And the immunotherapies that are now approved for Alzheimer’s, what they do is they label the amyloid plaques and make them more visible to the microglial cells so then they can recognize oh this is junk and they really get stirred up and they clean it out a lot better when there’s the immunotherapy present. And so that has been a major breakthrough, I think, in the field. But we need to continue to understand how the immune system operates in the disease process and make it better at clearing out the amyloid and maybe clearing out the tau pathology as well. I’m really excited about the future for therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. I think we’ve made huge progress over the last 30 years. It’s taken a long time. People have been frustrated that it’s taken a long time, but over that period of 30 years, we learned so much about the brain and about Alzheimer’s disease. The brain is the most complicated organ of the body. And it took us a long time to build up enough knowledge to be able to understand how we can stop this disease. And I think we’re really on the verge of doing that. So I’m very excited about the future.
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