A team of researchers at the Salk Institute have said that they have developed a new experimental drug to treat the Alzheimer's disease that is aimed at reducing the effects of aging. The drug was able to revers symptoms of the disease when the experiment as conduct d on mice, according to researchers.

Researchers said that most drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease are aimed at amyloid plaque that builds up in the brain. The researchers aimed at aging as it is one of the major causes for development of Alzheimer's disease. They said that it is appropriate to target aging as it is a major cause and many treatments developed to address plaques issue has ben ineffective.

The team has developed J147 using a set of cell-based screening assays that copy old age-associated neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's pathology. Initial trials have shown that it could prevent and reverse memory loss and Alzheimer's health effects in mice. The researchers recorded the expression of genes in the brain and identified molecules involved with metabolism in the brains and blood of rapidly aging mice to determine the effectiveness of the drug with the much more common form of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Antonio Currais, a research assistant at the Salk Institute, said in a press release, that, “Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases. We did not predict we'd see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters.”