Researchers report on a critical step toward an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease
Fortunately, the unmet need for a treatment for Alzheimer’s ensured that less than 20% of volunteers dropped out of the trial; previous studies of drug candidates often saw 20% to 25% of participants leave the study.that lecanemab was the first anti-amyloid drug to help patients slow their cognitive decline in a phase 3 study. “The phase 2 results ended up being quite predictive of the phase 3 results, and we expected that,” says Irizarry.
A drug that produces 27% improvement in performance on cognitive tests is not a slam-dunk therapy. But experts see it as a wedge into a new era of Alzheimer’s treatments: those that can chip away at the buildup of amyloid in the brain, and then eventually slow or prevent the damage to nerve cells that comes later in the disease course.
But based on the positive results, the door is now open to investigating how these anti-amyloid therapies can best be used to slow cognitive decline. Irizarry is already studying how lecanemab might be combined with other promising therapies, for example. Experts believe that the deposition of amyloid plaques leads to the disorganized structure of another protein, tau, which creates tangles that disrupt the critical connections neurons have to each other.
But the picture may not be as clear as patients might hope. While lecanemab seems to be an encouraging way to reduce amyloid in the brain and slow cognitive decline, other anti-amyloid drugs may not perform as well. Roche recently announced that its amyloid therapy, gantenerumab, failed to shrink amyloid plaques and show significant improvement on cognitive tests.
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