SANTO DOMINGO.- A Dominican scientist is blazing a trail in the frontier of medicine, where he and his colleagues believe there could be a number of key genes yet to be found in the effort to fight by Alzheimer's disease.  “The best chance of developing a cure for Alzheimer's is if gene hunters can track down the rest.”

In a BBC report on Wednesday highlights the work by the Dominican researcher Dr Martin Medrano, as one of those leading the hunt. “For the past 10 years, he has been travelling across the country, finding families affected by Alzheimer's.”

“It’s a good place to do this sort of work,” it says of the Dominican Republic, citing very little inward migration, and a lot of marriage within families in rural areas. “This gives researchers the chance to study a small and specific gene pool.”

But the most surprising finding the gene hunters came across are also at more than 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) away, in New York’s Washington Heights district, “where hundreds of thousands of Dominican immigrants have settled.”

It said Dr Medrano has examined, and gathered DNA samples from more than 3,000 people belonging to almost 600 families.

"We have started to detect families across the country with genes that give them a predisposition to the disease," Medrano says, and as confort for those stricken and their relatives: "This is allowing us to build up an extremely useful database."