A pill to make you smarter? Drug grows brain cells
(Reuters) – Researchers have found a drug that can help the brain grow new cells and said their study may lead to ways to improve experimental Alzheimer’s drugs.
The researchers’ work, done on rodents, builds on findings that all mammals, including humans, make brain cells throughout their lives. Most of these die, but this drug helps more of the baby cells survive and grow to become functioning brain cells.
“We make new neurons every day in our brain,” Andrew Pieper of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. “What our compound does in allow more of them to survive.”
The compound is called P7C3 for now, and the researchers have already started tweaking it to make it more effective. They said it seems safe and appears to work even when taken as a pill.
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