Chapter 118: Decision

“Alzheimer’s?”

Upon reading Wang Wei’s message, Chen Chen immediately recalled the kindly old man who always hung a smile on his face, the one who always carried a beaker filled with tea and was always at his best when in a classroom.

Professor Wang Xi was the Senior Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His name was extremely reputable in the academic world. Due to age restrictions, he had to be withdrawn from the frontlines at 65 years old.

Even the humorous man who was also a world-class top scientist capable of leading the industry was not immune to such common disease...

Chen Chen sighed faintly before raising his head and ordered, “Little X, help me look up information on Professor Wang Xi of Shangdu Jiao Tong University in Mainland China. I want to know the latest updates.”

“Got it!”

Little X’s response quickly resounded from the speakers. After that, Chen Chen’s computer booted up on its own, the display quickly flared up like a blossoming flower.

Countless windows were opened and subsequently closed. Within half a minute, Little X had broken through a certain firewall and had extracted an extremely confidential medical report.

“Department of Neurology, Affiliated Central Hospital of Shangdu Jiao Tong University. Patient Wang Xi, first stage of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Chen Chen knew that Wang Wei’s hypothesis was correct upon reading the sentence.

Around this same time last year, it was thanks to Professor Wang Xi’s assistance that Chen Chen was able to make a resolute decision.

Chen Chen gently raised his right hand to caress a thick brass ring he wore on his left index finger.

As Chen Chen gently brushed its surface, he seemed to have activated a hidden mechanism in the ring. In an instant, the face of the ring suddenly opened up silently, revealing several transparent pills under it.

Chen Chen took one of the pills and swallowed it. He closed his eyes after and allowed himself to relax.

One second, two seconds, three seconds...

Phew!

The familiar sensation of having a fine grasp on all things in the world came to him in a rush. Chen Chen abruptly opened his eyes and began to recall everything he knew about Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s was also commonly referred to as dementia back in the Mainland. It was a form of cerebral neurodegeneration that occurred upon reaching a certain age.

This form of disease may not appear lethal. It had been almost normalized due to how common it was. What most people did not know was that it was the second most significant disease in limiting the human lifespan, right under cancer.

There could be many causes for Alzheimer’s disease, the most common factor being old age. From fifty-years-old onward, the rate of contracting it increased with each passing year. By the time a common person reached eighty years old, the odds of being diagnosed with it was up to forty percent.

There were many other contributing factors apart from old age including genetics, mental illness, head trauma, sometimes even widowhood, living alone, financial difficulties or drastic life events that could lead to the development of Alzheimer’s.

Ermmm...

In other words, up to this point, the academic world had yet to pin down a definite cause for Alzheimer’s disease.

The medical sciences community always believed that “Aβ deposition” and “abnormal phosphorylation of tau protein” were the main culprits of Alzheimer’s disease. Following the development of certain drugs, the validity of these hypotheses began to be questioned.

The current consensus was that the “Aβ deposition” and “abnormal phosphorylation of tau protein” were merely a symptom of Alzheimer’s instead of the source of it.

Aβ deposition referred to Amyloid β-Protein deposition, which was a form of intracellular pathology which could lead to mitochondrial damage. It may even lead to many fatal diseases such as apoptosis.

This deposition phenomenon first manifested in the cerebral cortex. It spread to the depths of the brain as the severity increased, eventually destroying the human brain.

Currently, among the six internationally recognized therapeutic drugs, almost all of them were acetylcholinesterase inhibitor drugs with just one of them being NMDA receptor antagonist which stood out as an outlier.

Simply put, even the medicine in developed countries could only serve to slightly slow down the disease and allow the patient to live for a few more years. It was not able to accomplish anything else beyond that.

Word was that there was a new drug for Alzheimer’s disease in the China market. It was labeled as “The First Axial Biotherapeutics Drug In the World”. The fancy name aside, it was just a drug that facilitated intestinal bacteria.

A discussion for another day.

With the current technological scope, the damage caused by Alzheimer’s to the brain was still irreversible even after taking the related medications. This was because the primary cause of the disease was the death of a large amount of brain nerve cells.

In the later stages of the disease, the patient’s brain would have completely shrunken to a point where there was barely a hint of conscience remaining. The way Chen Chen saw it, being alive but not having a conscience was as good as being dead. What was the difference anyway?

If he wanted to save Professor Wang Xi, he could not spare a moment longer.

Chen Chen quickly got up and went to the power control room while instructing, “Little X, download the first Rise of the Planet of the Apes for me.”

Chen Chen came up with three solutions to treating Professor Wang Xi:

The first solution, which was also the easiest solution, was to use the USB drive and extract the details of the ALZ-112 drug in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

ALZ-112 was a virus with a specific genetic trait that was able to regeneratively repair neural circuits by infecting the brain accordingly.

Unlike the later developed ALZ-113, the ALZ-112 was not contagious, therefore, it would not reenact the pandemic scenario in the movie.

The flaw was that the ALZ-112 was only a temporary treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. It would not completely cure it.

However, Chen Chen was not optimistic about the chances of the first solution working out since the USB drive was unable to extract living organisms. Viruses were considered a class of living organisms as well, therefore, he resorted to extracting information on ALZ-112.

The information only appeared very briefly in the movie. There was no guarantee that the data was complete.

The second solution in case the first failed, Chen Chen could try to shoot a movie on Alzheimer’s. He could then extract the drug in his movie. This was a solution akin to cheating.

This would also be a completely new approach to Chen Chen’s usage of the USB drive.

Naturally, Chen Chen figured that the odds of success were next to zero.

If this method proved to work out, could Chen Chen simply shoot a movie about energy generation and simply create a device similar to the ZPM in Stargate and easily achieve unlimited energy generation?

That would violate the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

Still, despite the almost nil chance of this solution working out, it was worth a shot.

While attempting the second solution, Chen Chen could simultaneously implement the third solution – Active Research.

Since Chen Chen still had the NZT-48 up his sleeve, which from previous experiments he had concluded had a certain degree of effect on Alzheimer’s disease. If all else failed, Chen Chen could further delve into this aspect to achieve a breakthrough. This could also help add value to the neutral stem cell therapy research.

The human body possessed the natural ability to regenerate brain nerve cells but this ability slowly declined throughout the adolescent stages. By adulthood, a damaged central nervous system would no longer be able to regenerate on its own.

One of the causes of this was the lack of necessary cytokine stimulation. Additionally, the spaces left behind by the degraded dead cells become filled by other cells, thus creating a steric effect.

This was the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease being irreversible.

However, the usage of neural stem cells could break this rule.