Dimebon (dimebolin) treatment enhances cognition in patients withAlzheimer's disease (AD) or Huntington's disease. Although Dimebon was originally thought to improve cognition and memory through inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and the N-methyl-Daspartate (NMDA) receptor, the low in vitro affinity for these targets suggests that these mechanisms may not contribute to its clinical effects. To test this hypothesis, we assessed whether Dimebon enhances cognition in rats and if such an action is related to either mechanism or additional candidate mechanisms. Acute oral administration of Dimebon to rats (0.05, 0.5, and 5 mg/kg) enhanced cognition in a novel object recognition task and produced Dimebon brain concentrations of 1.7 Ϯ 0.43, 14 Ϯ 5.1, and 172 Ϯ 94 nM, respectively. At these concentrations, Dimebon did not alter the activity of recombinant human or rat brain AChE. Unlike the AChE inhibitors donepezil and galantamine, Dimebon did not change acetylcholine levels in the hippocampus or prefrontal cortex of freely moving rats. Dimebon displays affinity for the NMDA receptor (K i ϭ 105 Ϯ 18 M) that is considerably higher than brain concentrations associated with cognition enhancement in the novel object recognition task and 200-fold weaker than that of memantine (K i ϭ 0.54 Ϯ 0.05 M). Dimebon did not block NMDA-induced calcium influx in primary neuronal cells (IC 50 Ͼ 50 M), consistent with a lack of significant effect on this pathway. The cognition-enhancing effects of Dimebon are unlikely to be mediated by AChE inhibition or NMDA receptor antagonism, and its mechanism of action appears to be distinct from currently approved medications for AD.Dimebon (latrepirdine, dimebolin) is an investigational drug in Phase 3 clinical trials for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Huntington's disease (HD). Dimebon improved cognitive function in patients with AD during a 6-month placebo-controlled study with a 6-month open-label extension (Doody et al., 2008), and patients with HD showed some benefits in cognition in a 3-month Phase 2 study (Kieburtz et al., 2010). In the AD trial, patients treated with Dimebon also showed improvement over placebo in activities of daily living and in the behavioral and neuropsychiatric symptoms of AD, suggesting broad-based clinical improvement (Doody et al., 2008). The mechanism by which Dimebon exerts the favorable effects reported in these clinical studies is not clearly understood.Current AD therapeutics fall into two main pharmacologic classes: acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors, including donepezil, galantamine, and rivastigmine (Birks, 2006; These studies were funded by Medivation, Inc., San Francisco, California. Parts of these data were previously presented as follows: Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at