Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, together with researchers at the Polish Wroclaw University of Technology, have made a discovery that they claim may lead to the curing of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the so called mad cow disease) through photo therapy.
Piotr Hanczyc at Chalmers University of Technology is quoted in Science Daily as saying “Nobody has talked about using only light to treat these diseases until now. This is a totally new approach and we believe that this might become a breakthrough in the research of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. We have found a totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser light”. The researchers discovered, as they show in the journal Nature Photonics , that it is possible to distinguish aggregations of the proteins, believed to cause the diseases, from the properly-functioning proteins in the body by using multi-photon laser technique.
If the protein aggregates colud be removed, the disease is in principle cured. The problem until now has been to detect and remove the aggregates.