Huge News! Tanzi made AD in a Petri Dish!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/s...heimers-brain-cells-in-a-petri-dish.html?_r=0

Dr. Tanzi is now starting an ambitious project to test 1,200 drugs on the market and 5,000 experimental ones that have finished the first phase of clinical testing — a project that is impossible with mice, for which each drug test takes a year. With their petri dish system, Dr. Tanzi said, “we can test hundreds of thousands of drugs in a matter of months.”

“Sure enough, we saw plaques, real plaques,” Dr. Tanzi said. “We waited, and then we saw tangles, actual tangles. It looks like you are looking at an Alzheimer brain.”
All that was required to start the process was the Alzheimer’s gene, which made cells produce an excessive amount of a normal protein, beta amyloid. Previously, researchers had tried to grow the disease in a dish of liquid, but the neurons did not connect or develop plaques and tangles.