New Drug Shows Promise in Early Studies to Treat Alzheimer ’s

There hasn’t been much good news lately on the Alzheimer’s drug front, with a number of companies either abandoning their Alzheimer’s research efforts or stopping studies of experimental medications. Over the summer, Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca PLC terminated their development of an experimental treatment when studies failed to show improvement in people with early signs of cognitive impairment. In January, Pfizer closed its neurodegenerative disease research, and a month later, Merck stopped development of its Alzheimer’s drug candidate after disappointing results. But at the annual meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Chicago, there was some encouraging news about an anti-amyloid drug being tested by Eisai, a Japanese company, and Biogen, based in Massachusetts. The compound, BAN2401, is an antibody designed to stick to amyloid, the protein that builds up in the brain and can lead to sticky plaques that compromise nerve cells. The study involved people with mild cognitive impairment (which can be the gateway to dementia and Alzheimer’s dementia) or mild Alzheimer’s dementia, and according to the latest results, people treated with the experimental therapy showed a decrease in amyloid in the brain after 18 months compared to people treated with placebo. The treated group also showed slower declines on cognitive test scores at the end of the study, although the study did not have enough people to make this change statistically sign...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime Research Source Type: news