Amyl Therapeutics secures €8.25M Series A extension to validate novel neurodegenerative disease platform

Single treatment targets all amyloid protein aggregates underlying Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative disorders

07-Sep-2026 - Amyl Therapeutics, a preclinical stage biotechnology company developing an innovative technology platform to treat diseases linked to amyloid fibrils, announces the successful completion of an €8.25M ($9.4M) extension of its Series A financing, with half of the funding provided through public ...

Toadlet peptide transforms into a deadly weapon against bacteria

Potential for future medical applications

18-Jan-2021 - Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and EMBL Hamburg have discovered remarkable molecular properties of an antimicrobial peptide from the skin of the Australian toadlet. The discovery could inspire the development of novel synthetic drugs to combat bacterial infection. An ...

How Molecular Chaperones Dissolve Protein Aggregates Linked To Parkinson’s Disease

Researchers unravel the mechanism of amyloid fibril disaggregation

13-Nov-2020 - In many neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, protein aggregates form in the brain and are assumed to contribute to neuronal cell death. Yet there exists a cellular defence mechanism that counteracts these aggregates, known as amyloid fibrils, and can even dissolve fibrils already formed. ...

Fatal overproduction of antibodies

Mutations in plasma cells play a key role in light chain amyloidosis

11-Mar-2020 - Bone marrow plasma cells produce antibodies. These comprise two long and two short protein chains. The pathological proliferation of plasma cells can lead to an overproduction of the short chains. These associate to fibrils and deposit in organs. The result is fatal organ failure. A research team ...

Research into Parkinson’s disease: binding-protein prevents fibril proliferation

04-Sep-2019 - Several neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s are closely linked to the aggregation of a specific protein, α-synuclein. An international collaborative project involving Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and RWTH Aachen University has now shed ...

Assemblies of proteins relevant not only for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease

23-Aug-2019 - Amyloid fibrils play a crucial role in neurodegenerative illnesses. Scientists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and Forschungszentrum Jülich have now been able to use cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to decode the spatial structure of the fibrils that are formed from PI3K SH3 ...

Researchers identify when Parkinson's proteins become toxic to brain cells

16-Mar-2016 - Researchers have used a non-invasive method of observing how the process leading to Parkinson's disease takes place at the nanoscale, and identified the point in the process at which proteins in the brain become toxic, eventually leading to the death of brain cells. The results suggest that the ...

Wrangling proteins gone wild

01-Oct-2015 - Proteins sometimes run amuck. All the good stuff (the useful genetic and biological material) they contain can get distorted. Mutations in specific amino acids can cause long strands of proteins to curl in on themselves (like a ball of wool a cat has played with) and refuse to break apart. These ...

Amyloid formation may link Alzheimer disease and type 2 diabetes

18-Feb-2015 - The pathological process amyloidosis, in which misfolded proteins (amyloids) form insoluble fibril deposits, occurs in many diseases, including Alzheimer disease (AD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D). However, little is known about whether different forms of amyloid proteins interact or how ...

HIV study leads to insights into deadly infection

11-Jul-2014 - Research led by the University of Adelaide has provided new insights into how the HIV virus greatly boosts its chances of spreading infection, and why HIV is so hard to combat. HIV infects human immune cells by turning the infection-fighting proteins of these cells into a "backdoor key" that lets ...