Evaluation of the potential use of novel leptin-based hexamers in the treatment of neurodegenerative disease

Clinical studies have identified a link between leptin levels and the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Leptin-based therapies may be a novel target for AD as leptin has cognitive enhancing and neuroprotective actions in rodent models of AD. However recently we have shown that the whole leptin molecule is not required as smaller fragments of the leptin molecule mimic the brain actions of leptin. Thus developing leptin-mimetics based on the bioactive leptin fragment structure is a novel therapeutic strategy. In this study we propose to characterise the effects of 6 amino acid hexamers derived from the active leptin fragment and establish which of the hexamers display anti-AD prperties, using established cellular models of AD.