The cellular pathways of fruit flies — and humans — are helping researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School set the stage for potentially groundbreaking research into new ways to treat Alzheimer’s disease, researchers said.
In a statement posted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Monday, researchers said they have used data about fruit flies along with unique algorithms to discover new pathways, along with identifying genes, that may contribute to the development of a new class of drugs to treat the devastating disease.
The drugs currently approved to treat Alzheimer’s have not been as successful as hoped, the school said. Those drugs tend to target amyloid plaques in the brain, but the new research suggests other areas to target, the university said.
Matthew Leventhal, a 2025 doctoral candidate at MIT, is the lead author of the paper, which appeared Tuesday in Nature Communications.
“A more complete understanding of cell death pathways should provide an important new set of therapeutic targets in Alzheimer’s disease and related age-dependent neurodegenerative disorders,” Leventhal and his co-authors wrote. ”Our study identifies candidate pathways that could be targeted to ameliorate neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease.”
Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, was the senior author of the study.
“All the evidence that we have indicates that there are many different pathways involved in the progression of Alzheimer’s. It is multifactorial, and that may be why it’s been so hard to develop effective drugs,” Fraenkel said in the MIT statement. “We will need some kind of combination of treatments that hit different parts of this disease.”
Also providing critical research information was Dr. Mel B. Feany, a Harvard Medical School pathology professor whose namesake lab has created a version of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases like Lou Gehrig’s disease based on fruit flies.
For this effort, Feany’s lab identified fruit fly genes that declined neurologically, similar to what humans experience, the study said. Using algorithms from Fraenkel’s lab, the researchers located the new area of inquiry.
“The search for Alzheimer’s drugs will get dramatically accelerated when there are very good, robust experimental systems,” Fraenkel said in the MIT statement. “We’re coming to a point where a couple of really innovative systems are coming together.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
MIT along with Brown University and others research institutions are challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to indirect costs in federal court. MIT said the cuts to the NIH budget will cost MIT as much as $35 million annually.
“We oppose these cuts because they will erode America’s global scientific leadership and deprive the American people of the fruits of research with untold potential benefits for their health and well-being,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in February.
John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him @JREbosglobe.