RESEARCH Development of a novel c

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleIntroduction Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic, irreversible and progressive neurodegenerative disease. AD is character-ized by extracellular deposition of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides as senile plaques (Glenner and Wong 1984), intraneuronal neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) (Kosik et al. 1986; Wood et al. 1986), astrogliosis (Rodriguez et al. 2009), microglial acti-vation (Giri et al. 2003) and loss of synapses and neurons in the brain (Selkoe 2002; Whitehouse et al. 1982). Genetic linkage analysis of familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD) iden-tified amyloid precursor protein (APP) (Chartier-Harli