Alzheimer's Unlocked

By ALICE PARK 

Phillip Toledano for TIME

"Our understanding of Alzheimer's is better than it looks based on the clinical trials," says — Lennart Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute for Neurological Diseases and a — neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "Despite all the reports about how dismal the situation is, it is probably more hopeful in some respects now because there are more candidate [treatments] in the pipeline."It's been nearly a decade since a much anticipated trial of a vaccine to treat Alzheimer's disease failed to address the memory-robbing symptoms of the disease, and in the intervening years, researchers have not had much success in interrupting the slow mental decline that accompanies the condition. But that trend appears to be changing, as scientists focus their attention on intervening at earlier stages in Alzheimer's course and developing better treatments that may more accurately target the causes of the disease./.../