Today, when an aging parent, friend, or relative starts to forget things, getting a clear diagnosis can still be surprisingly hard.
Even for Alzheimer’s disease—the most common type of dementia—doctors usually rely on observing a person’s behavior. Brain scans and blood tests are used, but they are not very clear or reliable.
In fact, the only way to be absolutely sure someone had Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia is by examining their brain after they’ve passed away.
To help solve this problem, scientists at UC San Francisco tested hundreds of chemical dyes—many of which were originally created for industrial purposes—to see if any of them could stick to the clumps of proteins that build up in the brain during dementia.
These protein clumps are different in various types of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, and progressive supranuclear palsy.
The research team, led by pharmaceutical chemistry professor Dr. Jason Gestwicki, aimed to find dyes that could recognize the different shapes of a protein called tau. This protein forms unusual clumps in several kinds of dementia. They created different shapes of tau protein in the lab and tested how 300 different dyes reacted with them.
Through repeated testing, the scientists narrowed the list of 300 dyes to just 27 that seemed promising. Further testing revealed that 10 of these dyes strongly stuck to the tau clumps. One of the dyes even lit up tau clumps in mice that had been engineered to model Alzheimer’s disease, and it worked on brain tissue from deceased Alzheimer’s patients.
The researchers didn’t stop with tau. They also tested the dyes on two other proteins known to form clumps in other brain diseases. They found a few more dyes that could bind to those clumps too. This means these old dyes—some of which may have failed in other industrial uses—could now play a new role in helping diagnose brain diseases.
This discovery gives scientists valuable clues for designing new dyes that can tell the difference between various dementias while a person is still alive. Dr. Gestwicki’s team hopes that their method for testing dyes will be useful not only for dementia research, but also for diagnosing other serious diseases like cancer or neurological conditions.
“Progress with diagnosing and treating all the different dementias has been halting and slow,” said Dr. Gestwicki. “We’re optimistic that our streamlined approach to screening dyes can change the landscape of research and, ultimately, the care we provide for these devastating conditions.”
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was published in the journal Nature Chemistry on August 14.
If you care about dementia, please read studies about Common drug for constipation is linked to higher dementia risk and findings of Scientists find link between heartburn drugs and increased dementia risk.
If you care about dementia, please read studies about Scientists find a drug related to Viagra may help treat vascular dementia and findings of link between body inflammation and dementia risk.
The study is published in Nature Chemistry.
Copyright © 2025 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
