According to British researchers, an Alzheimer's drug that attacks anomalous tangles in the brain seemed to decelerate the progression of the disease. However, physicians said that the medicine needed more study.

TauRX is the biotechnology company that created the drug and named it Rember. It appears that the medicine generated a noteworthy enhancement in the memory of people diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer's disease, Reuters reported.

The trial involved 321 patients at 17 centers in the UK and Singapore, having mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, researchers told the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease 2008. The participants were separated into groups receiving Rember or a placebo. They were evaluated at intervals over seven years. "We've held the disease at bay for a total of 19 months, whereas the control group declined at the expected rate," Claude Wischik of the University of Aberdeen and chairman of TauRX Therapeutics in Singapore said in an interview. Cognitive tests and brain scans showed that the patients who received Rember coped notably better than the control group.

The results were "fantastic," said Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, chief of Alzheimer's research at the National Institute on Aging. This breakthrough is among the first to attack tangles of tau protein in the brain which are strongly linked to dementia in Alzheimer's disease, a disease which affects more than 26 million people across the world, rapidly increasing as they get older.