Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Despite Its Modest Goals, Promising Alzheimer's Drug Is Latest In Long String Of Failures To Combat Disease
Los Angeles Times: One Of The Most Promising Drugs For Alzheimer's Disease Fails In Clinical Trials
To the roughly 400 clinical trials that have tested some experimental treatment for Alzheimer's disease and come up short, we can now add three more. An experimental drug called idalopirdine failed to help people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease in a trio of trials that involved 2,525 patients in 34 countries. Not only did the drug fail to bring about any meaningful change in cognitive tests that are widely used in diagnosing and tracking the progress of the disease, it also failed to cause significant improvements in general measures of daily function among those taking it at any of three tested doses. (Healy, 1/9)
Stat: A New Alzheimer's Drug, Once Worth Billions, Is Headed For The Trash
Axovant Sciences (AXON), 2017’s most talked-about biotech company, is abandoning the drug that made it famous after yet another clinical trial failure. The company, valued at more than $2.8 billion in September, will no longer study intepirdine after finding the drug to be useless against dementia with Lewy bodies, a memory-destroying disease that can affect mood and balance. Last year, intepirdine failed in a 1,300-patient Alzheimer’s disease trial, sending Axovant’s share price down more than 75 percent. (Garde, 1/8)
The Wall Street Journal: Despite Setbacks, Drugmakers Have Plans To Fight Alzheimer’s
During the fiscal year 2017, the National Institutes of Health will have poured an estimated $1.35 billion into Alzheimer’s disease, almost triple its investment for fiscal year 2013. And Pfizer said it had plans to establish a corporate venture fund focused on neuroscience projects. Sales of successful treatments for the disorder could amount to billions of dollars as demand for therapies increase due to an aging population. Analysts had predicted that annual sales for Axovant’s drug, known as intepirdine, could have topped $2 billion. (Hernandez, Whalen and Prang, 1/8)
The Hill: Pfizer Ends Research Into New Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Drugs
Drug giant Pfizer will end research into new neuroscience drugs, including those for Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, the company announced this weekend. That decision followed an internal review and will result in about 300 jobs cut, the company said. (Hellmann, 1/8)
