Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast. Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett. If you haven't listened to the last episode about the history of research into Alzheimer's disease, I'd recommend you listen to that before digging into this episode.

Decades of research and still, clinical trials of drugs to treat Alzheimer's fail again and again.

Still, researchers are looking to the future. That's next.

Space travel depends on clever math.

Find unexplored solar systems in Quantum Magazine's new daily math game, Hyperjumps.

Hyperjumps challenges you to find simple number combinations to get your rocket from one exoplanet to the next. Spoiler alert, there's always more

than one way to win. Test your astral arithmetic at hyperjumps.comptumagazine.org.

We all know the failures of clinical trials don't necessarily mean that the science they're based on is invalid.

In fact, amyloid hypothesis supporters have often argued that many of the attempted therapies could have failed because patients enrolled in the trials didn't get the anti-ameloid drugs early enough in their battle with Alzheimer's

disease. The problem with the disease is that since no one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer's

disease, there's no way of knowing how early the interventions need to be. Risk factors might arise

when you're 50 years old or when you're 15. If they happen

very early in life, are they definitive causes of a condition that occurs decades later? And how

useful can a potential treatment be if it needs to be prescribed that early? Ralph Nixon is the

Director of Research at the Center for Dementia Research

at the Nathan S. Klein Institute in New York State. The amyloid hypothesis has evolved over time so that

every time there's a new set of findings that question some aspect of it, it morphs into a different hypothesis.

But the fundamental premise that extracellular amyloid plaques are the trigger for all the other

pathologies has stayed the same. Scott Small is the director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research

Center at Columbia University.

Small, a researcher who works on alternate theories, says he started to lose respect for a few of

the Amyloid Cascade supporters who continue to hold their breath for encouraging results.

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