Axonyx Inc.

Watching a friend or family member deteriorate as a result of senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type, also called Alzheimer's disease (AD), is excruciating. Usually, by the time AD is diagnosed, patients have already suffered serious cognitive deterioration and there is little that can be done for them. Biomedical researchers and pharmaceutical companies know that a magic bullet that would prevent the deterioration that comes with AD would be a major drug in the world market. The question these researchers and companies ask, says Nigel Greig, PhD, head of drug design and development at the National Institute on Aging(NIA), National Institutes of Health's (NIH's), is "How do you keep the person so that they're not impaired, they can look after themselves, and don't require institutionalization in the latter parts of their life before something else actually takes them?"

Greig is one of the people developing those answers. He is one of the developers of the drug, phenserine (actually...