Page 49 - 04_May-2025

by Caroline Barlott
photography
Eric Beliveau
Distant
Memory
A distinguished neurologist devotes himself
to reversing Alzheimer’s memory loss
Dr. Jack Jhamandas brings up a video on a
computer screen in his lab at the University of Alberta’s
Heritage Medical Research Centre. It shows a recorded video
of a mouse easily navigating its way through a pool of water
to a platform where there’s a button for it to push.
The task should be harder for the mouse, which has
been genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s. During an
earlier test, it struggled to make its way to that button. Then
it was administered a drug that Jhamandas and his team of
researchers have been developing for decades, and it found
its way again — a memory seemingly restored.
While it’s in early stages, that drug appears to do some-
thing that no other on the market has done successfully:
potentially preventing Alzheimer’s symptoms and even
reversing the damage. So far, it’s working. At least in mice.
Attempts to bring new drugs to market can take years and
cost billions. Sometimes, those attempts ultimately fail. But
Jhamandas, now 73 and putting off retirement to find a
treatment for a disease that is the most common cause of
dementia in Canada, believes there’s reason for hope. And
he’s become surrounded by others who believe that too, and
who are eager to help.
During his post-doctorate in the late 1980s,
Jhamandas and his team focused on an area of the brain
called the basal forebrain. He was initially interested in the
role it plays in regulating blood pressure. But when he learned
that the area was even more critical for learning, and often
the first area of the brain to be affected by Alzheimer’s, those
facts stood out, partly because of what he was seeing in
the clinic.
Formerly a practicing medical doctor, Jhamandas had known
many patients who were scared by the confusion associated
with the early days of the disease. “I saw firsthand the helpless-
ness, and also felt it,” he says. The only drugs available to
prescribe were stopgap measures that only temporarily
improved symptoms. Sometimes they did nothing at all.
LEFT: Dr. Jack Jhamandas in his lab at the U of A
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