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Curing What Ails Alzheimer’s Drug Development

 
• By Rachel Laing, Alessia Deglincerti, and Mark Ratner

Biomarkers will be key to winning the race to a successful AD drug. Even then, drugmakers must build the infrastructure for getting therapy to the right patients at the right time.

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As the drug industry has seen over the past decade with immunotherapy in cancer, success breeds success and opens the door to investment in new targets and rationales. That’s long been the hope in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug development, where a hard-to-segment patient population and large, lengthy, expensive trials have continued to frustrate companies. The pharma industry claims to be learning from the past, but the pattern of high-profile, late-stage failures, most recently by Axovant Sciences Ltd. and Merck & Co. Inc., is unbroken. Success remains elusive. (Also see "Disappointed, Yes, But Roivant's Not Roiled By Axovant's Alzheimer's Failure" - Scrip, 27 September, 2017.) (Also see "Another Nail In Amyloid Hypothesis Coffin? Merck Ends Pivotal BACE Inhibitor Study" - Scrip, 15 February, 2017.)

On the bright side, it is conceivable that in the next two to four years, one of the AD drug...

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