“We used a group of mice that have Alzheimer’s disease, and we injected them over a series of injections,” said PhD student Nicole Maphis. She said the vaccine targets a specific protein known as tau that’s commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

“These antibodies seem to have cleared (out) pathological tau. Pathological tau is one of the components of these tangles that we find in the brains of patients with Alzheimers disease,” she explained. The response lasted for months, according to UNM.

Those long tangles “disrupt the ability of neurons to communicate with one another,” the school points out, adding that tau is “normally a stabilizing structure inside of neurons.”