“Tau and the complexity of Alzheimer disease”

Bradley Hyman, M.D., Ph.D., John B Penney Professor of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School Recent studies suggest that tau protein can adopt multiple conformations, which may have different consequences for neurodegeneration. This idea leads to the possibility that there are “prion-like” properties of tau, and that different clinical phenotypes may be a result, in part, of tau’s properties.