In a development that researches have called ‘crushing’, two new Alzheimer’s drug treatments have failed their latest clinical trial. This latest failure, added to the 300 drugs that have already been found ineffective for treatment of Alzheimer’s, have led some experts to question the direction of research.
The two treatments, solanezumab and gantenerumab, are both anti-amyloids, as were the majority of treatments in the last 30 years. The near-comprehensive failure of anti-amyloids to date have led some researchers to question whether the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain are a cause or marker of Alzheimer’s.
The DIAN-TU trial of the drugs attempted to mitigate the perceived flaws of previous studies by using a much higher dosage and recruiting healthy individuals with a genetic certainty of developing Alzheimer’s and extending the duration to five years.
While no researchers a yet willing to completely rule out the amyloid theory, some – such as UTS director of neuroscience and regenerative medicine, Professor Bryce Vissel – to call for more investigation of ‘alternative views’ of Alzheimer’s and it’s treatment.
“It raises an urgent question, again, about the approach we’ve been using, and whether fundamentally this is just telling us we need to look at the disease differently,” he said.
On the other hand, Professor Colin Masters from the University of Melbourne, a leading expert in the field and one of the principal investigators of the DIAN-TU trial, has stated that the evidence is still in favour of the anti-amyloid approach.
Professor Masters has argued that the small size of the trial and the under-dosing of the drugs meant it was always unlikely to achieve its primary objective, but that further analysis was likely to return positive results in terms of the roughly ten secondary objectives.
Whether anti-amyloids ultimately prove effective or not, the field is likely to move more towards multi-targeted approaches, something Professor Amy Brodtmann of the Florey Institute and Royal Melbourne Hospital says has already been happening for at least the last four years.
“There’s drugs now that are targeting tau, targeting inflammation in the brain, and drugs looking at protecting nerve cells from the damages of abnormal proteins,” she said.
Non-pharmacological areas of research include lifestyle changes, cardiovascular health and insulin resistance, among many others.
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Source: ABC News
