Professor Luke O'Neill
speaker
1,535 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But still a huge amount of money is needed to look after people with Alzheimer's disease, given that many end up in care homes and all.
There are some treatments, but still huge burden.
And that's why if we can decrease it, that'll be a big saving overall to any health care system is the overall idea there when it comes to health economics.
Now, the big sort of pathologic factor here that's causing it, that's the big question, what's causing it?
And then what treatments might you be able to get?
Well, all the evidence suggests there's a protein that builds up in your brain.
It's called beta amyloid, a second protein called tau.
These are two normal proteins and they begin to clunk together and begin to sort of form these huge big clumps.
They're called plaques.
in the hippocampus.
And that's where your memories are.
So those plaques seem to be damaging the hippocampus.
And from my own research as well, and many of us have been doing this, that triggers the immune response and immune cells go in, try and clear the plaque, because their job is to suck up nasty things, macrophages of the cells,
microglial cells in the brain.
And guess what?
They overheat and explode and they damage the neurons.
So there's drugs in development now to stop the inflammatory process, including an NLRP3 inhibitor that we work on.
That may stop the fire going off, the inflammatory fire with the immune system.
It's an amazing number of trials going on.
there are tens and tens of trials.
Showing 361–380 of 1,535 · page 19 of 77
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