(bright music) (bright music continues) - When I'm stuck on a problem, music can transport me into realms that help me solve it as if my right brain is helping my left brain come out of a ditch so that they can work on it together.

(bright music continues) I'm Karen Ashe, professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota and the director of the N. Bud Grossman Center for Memory Research and Care, and I'm also the CEO of a company called Myriel.

(bright music continues) I went to medical school at Harvard and in my third or fourth year, I went into the library and looked at different journals.

I knew that I needed to pick a profession whose journals that I would enjoy reading for the rest of my career.

And I loved the neurology journals and I thought, "Wow, this is so neat."

(bright music continues) When I was a resident in neurology 40 years ago, one of my teachers told me that the diseases that caused dementia are waste basket diseases.

(bright music continues) Neurologists love to classify diseases according to their causes and put them neatly into filing cabinets but we couldn't do that with dementia because we didn't know what caused them.

(bright music continues) People can get dementia as they get older.

Dementia is what results when certain aspects of mentation break down, aspects like memory and language, abstract thinking, behaving appropriately, doing calculations, having a sense of direction.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia.

It's one of many forms of dementia.

(bright music continues) We are studying mentation and how it goes wrong.

We all have millions of memories and they're like metaphorical light bulbs.

Our brains can strengthen and weaken memories by increasing and decreasing electrical activity, (bright music continues) and we've found a molecule called caspase-2 that decreases electrical signals and weakens memories.

We need caspase-2 normally, because we can't handle millions of memories all at once, just as we wouldn't want all the lights on all the time.

But the problem in Alzheimer's disease is that caspase-2 is on overdrive, so we can't recover our memories.

We began to try and make a drug to block caspase-2 and this year, we developed a prototype that can repair the synapses in cells that are growing in a dish.

(bright music continues) We're excited because we think that these drugs will not only prevent, but also reverse memory problems.

Even more exciting, we think that the memories that are lost are still there, but could be recovered by this drug.

(bright music continues) So we started at home base, and it took 10 years for us to get to a prototype which is a compound that restores synaptic function in neurons growing in a dish.

We hope that in four years, we'll be at second base which means we'll have a compound that gets into the brain and restores memory function in mice.

I would say, we would be at third base when we have compounds that are safe in small groups of humans, but we will not get to home base again until the drug is shown to be both safe and effective in two large groups of patients.

(bright music continues) It's every scientist's dream to make the world a better place, and we work very hard to try and make discoveries that will help us make the world a better place.

(gentle music) (birds chirp) (birds chirp) (gentle music)