Alzheimer’s: dreams of Big Pharma

New Drug Trial Seeks to Stop Alzheimer’s Before It Starts – basically nice news! Let’s go to details:

In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer’s, people who are genetically guaranteed to develop the disease — but who do not yet have any symptoms — will for the first time be given a drug intended to stop it, federal officials announced Tuesday.

Experts say the study will be one of the few ever conducted to test prevention treatments for any genetically predestined disease. For Alzheimer’s, the trial is unprecedented, “the first to focus on people who are cognitively normal but at very high risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

Well, what is proposed here is personalized approach! What does it mean?

1.       Diagnostics market for Alzheimer’s will increase

2.       Even healthy patients will be treated with the drug!

Guess what? This is exactly what Big Pharma needs!  And even more – the state will pay for the whole party:

The drug trial is part of the federal government’s first national plan to address Alzheimer’s, which was unveiled Tuesday by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary for health and human services. The government took the unusual step of assigning $50 million from the current year’s N.I.H. budget to research considered too promising to wait, including the Colombia trial and a study on whether inhaled insulin can ease mild cognitive impairment, Dr. Collins said. Another $100 million is proposed for 2013, mostly for research, but also for education, caregiver support and data collection.

Amazing! And what is the drug? What? Monoclonal antibody? I am serious! Nothing better was found/discovered/developed?

The drug, Crenezumab, attacks amyloid plaques in the brain. If it can forestall memory or cognitive problems, scientists will know that prevention or delay is possible and appears to lie in targeting amyloid years before dementia develops. Many, but not all, Alzheimer’s researchers believe amyloid is an underlying cause of Alzheimer’s.

I am not sure about amyloid’s role in Alzheimer’s but I know for sure that monoclonal antibodies do not work well in the majority of cases. Well, I think that trial is failed before it was started, but who cares? The show must go on...