Easter Island's Soil Contains Medical Marvel

Easter Island, the lonely remnant of a long-extinct volcano sitting 2,000 miles west of the Chilean coast in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. But the most recent surprise that the island presents to us has nothing to do with the haunting stone carvings that arise from the soil, but rather with the bacteria that live within it.

As we wrote last summer, a compound discovered in Easter Island soil in the 1970s was more recently discovered to have life-extending qualities. This find led to the development of the drug rapamycin, named after the island's Polynesian name Rapa Nui, which is successfully used to minimize the risk of organ transplant rejection. But as Science Daily now reports, rapamycin's benefits are expanding thanks to new medical research to include boosting memory and even perhaps to aiding the fight against Alzheimer's disease.

The new research, performed at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and published in the current issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, finds rapamycin to have been successful in reversing damaged cognitive and memory function in a study involving mice. The findings offer hope that the compound offers a promising new lead in the treatment of the deteriorating cognitive function that appears in people afflicted with Alzheimer's.

As Science Daily reports, the research team's results indicated that the brain lesions in their mice, similar to those in humans with Alzheimer's, decreased during the treatment. These are the first findings of successful reversal of such symptoms using laboratory animals. Lead study author Salvatore Oddo is quoted by Science Daily as expressing enthusiasm about the findings and eagerness to move on to the next steps in the research program that will probably get underway very soon:

"Our findings may have a profound clinical implication. Because rapamycin is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drug, a clinical trial using it as an anti-Alzheimer's disease therapy could be started fairly quickly."

We're still not sure about how those statues were put in place, nor why exactly they were installed, but the soil of Easter Island seems poised to play a role in unlocking one of the more elusive and cruel mysteries confronting modern medical science.

Photo by Rivi via Wikimedia Commons.