Most people know someone with Alzheimer’s disease. When I was growing up, my grandmother struggled with dementia, and I saw firsthand how difficult that was for our family.

That experience was one reason I became a neurotoxicologist who studies how misshapen proteins and inflammation in the brain can increase over time and cause dementia. While there are ways to treat the symptoms of dementia, researchers are still in search of a cure.

Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia are difficult to study, in part because diagnosing the disease early in people is challenging. These diseases typically begin developing two decades prior to most symptoms that would prompt someone to see a clinician. As a result, most researchers use mouse models to test potential therapies for Alzheimer’s.

However, the effects of drugs developed in mice rarely translate to people. In fact, 99% of drugs developed for Alzheimer’s that showed promise in the lab failed in human clinical trials. Brain aging is hard to study in mice, as they do not naturally have the buildup of misshapen proteins seen in dementia. Researchers can genetically modify mice to mimic what happens in a human brain, but it is........

© The Conversation