Opportunities and challenges in developing relevant animal models for Alzheimer's disease

A major impediment to the development of safe and effective therapeutics in Alzheimer's disease (AD) lies in difficulties in translating research findings across species: therapies that work in rodents often do not translate to humans. A route to bridge the gap between promising rodent research and the human clinical condition consists in using non-human primates (NHPs), which are phylogenetically much closer to humans. In this article, we discuss the importance of investigating disease mechanisms from cell culture, through different animal models of disease. We highlight that developing a viable, validated NHP AD model will likely be a key step toward understanding AD-relevant pathogenic mechanisms and for developing therapies that will effectively translate to the human disease condition.