A 17-year-old Connecticut student has identified two FDA-approved drugs that could potentially help reduce Alzheimer’s-related damage in brain cells, after investigating a biological pathway linked to one of the strongest genetic risk factors for the disease.
Leon Wang, a student at King School in Stamford, studied whether medicines already approved for other conditions could be repurposed to target cellular changes associated with Alzheimer’s. His research focused on APOE4, a gene variant known to be the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.