In Alzheimer‘s disease, the knowledge about the proteolysis of amyloid precursor protein(APP) is of utmost importance for the development of therapeutic agents.
An important step in amyloid beta production is the cleavage of APP by beta secretase (BACE1). It cleaves off the sAPPbeta from the entire protein. sAPPbeta is present in different isoforms. The most frequent naturally occurring variant of sAPPbeta is the nonmutated wild-type isoform.
sAPPbeta (wild-type) is determined to investigate the activity of BACE1 as well as the efficacy of its inhibition.
BACE1 is a very interesting drug target in the development of therapeutic agents and is already being tested by various pharmaceutical companies1,2.
Up to now it was not possible to determine the endogenous sAPPbeta (wild-type) cleavage product in mice. For the first time now, however, the sAPPbeta- Wild type (mouse) ELISA makes it possible to directly trace the beta-cleavage activity in a mouse model.