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YOUNGSTOWN – An intensely bright burst of pulsing green laser light has also given the go-ahead to eradicate the main building block of what is believed to be a prelude to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s a way to target only those proteins, not the ones you need,” said Gregg Sturrus, chair of the physics, astronomy, geography and earth sciences department at Youngstown State University.
Sturrus refers to the use of complex laser technology to remove what he called “bad proteins” that lead to neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. The abnormal accumulation of a protein sometimes forms certain threads which create such tangles.
These tangles can interfere with the communication skills between neurons.
But by using laser technology, “the good proteins aren’t affected,” Sturrus explained. Only the bad are eradicated.
Spearheading research into test fluids in laboratory testing is Halberd Corp., a biomedical company based in Jackson Center, Pa. Halberd Corp. works with YSU.
Sturrus is also a member of Halberd’s scientific advisory board.
Last week, Sturrus performed a demonstration in which infrared and green light was filtered through a hole in the back of a fancy laser device before hitting and reflecting off a refractory brick. The light then struck a test tube containing a small amount of a buffer solution.
For the replication trials conducted by YSU, Sturrus normally instead of the brick has an aquarium that is just over half full with water. The water reservoir filters infrared light from the laser before it comes into contact with the test tube.
The fluid in the test tube is treated with a specific antibody associated (connected) to metal particles of similar size, some of which are as small as 20 or 40 nanometers (one billionth of a meter), noted Sturrus.
Such antibodies are able to bind to what are called phosphorylated tau antigens, and then the following nanoparticles are subjected to the appropriate laser frequency, he explained.
The antigen is associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.
As a result, the heat of light destroys the target antigen or protein and eliminates the disease pathogen.
“I really think the laser is going to go through these (antigens) and tick them off,” Sturrus said.
Nonetheless, what creates the antigens remains a mystery, he warned.
Sturrus noted that he and some of his students conducted one, three, and 10 minute functional tests. The three-minute tests killed about 35 percent of the antigens; the longer ones resulted in a “total killing”, he said.
“We have kind of a timescale,” Sturrus added.
The university also sent samples to Qiang “Shawn” Chen, an Arizona State University molecular biologist who specializes in developing vaccines in plants to fight infectious diseases and certain types of cancer. Chen can learn a lot from the samples regarding the antigen content, Sturrus said.
William A. Hartman, chairman and chief executive officer of Halberd, noted that antigens and metal nanoparticles must work together for laser technology to work.
Hartman, 80, graduated from YSU (then Youngstown College) in 1964 with a degree in mechanical engineering, said he was convinced that the remaining antigens linked to Alzheimer’s disease can be removed in lab tests.
In addition, the technology might also be able to fight two inflammatory cytokines linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, he explained. Cytokines are tiny proteins that cells release and have a specific effect on communications and interactions between cells.
“We will be working on these in the next few weeks,” Hartman said.
Hartman, whose father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, remembers coming to work with Sturrus after seeing the work he was doing in his lab.
“We gave him a chance and he fulfilled our every wish,” he said.
Hartman added that he also intends to have discussions about the results with the NFL and the military – especially with the high number of suicides among soldiers with PTSD.
But he noted that the technology is still in its infancy, just as the Wright Brothers powered flights in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina were comparable to commercial aviation today. .
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