A study has found that green tea’s astringent catechin component (EGCG) breaks down tau protein, which is known to cause Alzheimer’s disease in the brain.
Although the academic community has reported that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the complex action of the accumulation of beta-amyloid protein and tau protein entanglement, no treatment targeting tau protein has been found yet. The only Alzheimer’s disease drug ‘Aducanumab’ approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a method that removes beta-amyloid protein, and its main effect is to delay the onset of the disease. The medical community believes that the tangled tau protein mass must be removed in order to stop the disease progression itself.
A research team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States published the results of a study in the international scientific journal Nature Communications on the 16th (local time) that green tea catechins break down the tangled tau protein.
Previously, green tea catechins were confirmed to have molecules capable of decomposing beta-amyloid protein. However, due to the nature of it binds with other proteins in the process of entering the body and reduces their effectiveness, studies using them as therapeutics have not been actively conducted.
In order to check whether the green tea catechin component has the effect of decomposing the entangled tau protein, the research team incubated this component directly on the protein and observed it over time. As a result, about half of the tau protein that had been tangled was decomposed within 3 hours, and all tangled lumps disappeared after one day. After freezing the decomposing tau protein mass, the research team confirmed that the catechin component cuts the protein into harmless pieces.
Then, through computer simulation, it was analyzed which molecules in the green tea catechins decomposed the tangled tau protein. It was confirmed that there are hundreds of molecules in the catechin component that can bind better with the tau protein. Among them, 6 molecules were found to play a role in decomposition. The research team selected the two molecules most active in the degradation process and named them ‘CNS-11’ and ‘CNS-17’, respectively.
The research team said, “It is very recently that scientists have learned the structure of the tau protein tangled.