Strong animal data for Cortex' Ampakines

Cortex, a USA-based specialist drugmaker focused on the area of neuroscience, says that its Ampakine drugs have demonstrated clear benefits in rat models of age-related cognitive decline.

The Irvine, California-based firm is developing both high- and low-impact Ampakines - a class of compounds that bind at different sites of the AMPA brain receptor - to increase endogenous levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is important for restoring memory deficits as a result of aging, as well as for other neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease, Fragile X, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, where evidence suggests that elevation of BDNF may produce disease-modifying effects in the patient populations.

According to the new data, which was published in the August issue of The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers found that Ampakines reverse age-related declines in cognitive functions in old rats, returning their cognitive ability to those of young rats, an effect they attributed to the up-regulation of BDNF because, when an antagonist to BDNF was co-administered with the Ampakine compounds, the older rats in the study returned to the age-related cognitive impairment level.