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E. Shyam P. Reddy: Two Cancer Medications that Could Treat the most Common Form of Dementi

E. Shyam P. Reddy/LinkedIn

Jul 23, 2025, 18:03

E. Shyam P. Reddy: Two Cancer Medications that Could Treat the most Common Form of Dementi

E. Shyam P. Reddy, Professor and Director of the Cancer Biology Program at Morehouse School of Medicine, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Scientists at UC San Francisco and Gladstone Institutes have identified cancer drugs that promise to reverse the changes that occur in the brain during Alzheimer’s, potentially slowing or even reversing its symptoms.

The study compared the gene expression signature of Alzheimer’s disease with those elicited by 1,300 approved drugs and found a combination of two cancer medications that could treat the most common form of dementia. The findings appear in Cell.

The study first analyzed how Alzheimer’s disease altered gene expression in single cells in the human brain. Then, researchers looked for existing drugs that were already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and cause the opposite changes to gene expression.

They were looking specifically for drugs that would reverse the gene expression changes in neurons and in other types of brain cells called glia, all of which are damaged or altered in Alzheimer’s disease.

Next, the researchers analyzed millions of electronic medical records to show that patients who took some of these drugs as part of their treatment for other conditions were less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

When they tested a combination of the two top drugs—both of which are cancer medications—in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s, it reduced brain degeneration in the mice, and even restored their ability to remember.

‘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,’ said Marina Sirota, Ph.D., the interim director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, professor of pediatrics, and co-senior author of the paper.”

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