Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, which causes impaired memory, attention and language comprehension due to the loss of nerve cells. One of the reasons why nerve cells shrink is that a small protein, called beta-amyloid or Abeta, changes and begins to clump together into plaques of amyloid. There seems to be something in the process where Abeta goes from a healthy protein to amyloid plaques that are toxic to nerve cells. "We study a protein part called BRICHOS, which has been found in many different proteins, including the brain. BRICHOS has been shown to effectively prevent Abeta from clumping together to form amyloid. This makes administration of BRICHOS or activation of the body's own BRICHOS completely new possible treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease. We will now further study how BRICHOS affects Abeta and how it can prevent Abeta from becoming toxic to neurons. So far, we have used experiments in test tubes, cultured cells and fruit flies. Fruit flies are used as a model to study whether BRICHOS can prevent Abeta from becoming toxic in a living brain, and our preliminary results are very promising. BRICHOS prevents aggregation of Abeta and counteracts impaired neuronal function. Therefore, we now want to further study how to administer BRICHOS to the brain, and how well BRICHOS prevents Abeta aggregation and toxicity in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease.