The news last week about a “promising” development in Alzheimer’s drug research was received by experts and patient advocates with cautious optimism, and the required skepticism.
The last thing anyone needs is false expectations. But for exhausted families and caregivers and especially the huge aging population of baby boomers who fear the onset of dementia – any sign of progress against this devastating disease is welcome.
Biogen, the Cambridge based bio-tech company, and its Japanese partner Eisai, reported that clinical trials of a new drug – BAN2401 – slowed the causes and progress of Alzheimer’s disease. Of patients taking the highest dose of the drug, 81 percent showed a reduction in the sticky substance in the brain – amyloid plaque – that is the marker of Alzheimer’s. In that group, the rate of cognitive decline – like remembering and planning – slowed by 30 percent.
“A 30 percent slowing of decline is something I would want my family member to have,” said Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, the largest private, non-profit funder of Alzheimer’s research. The drugs ability to clear brain plaque “looks pretty amazing,” she told the AP.
There’s no talk of a cure. And, one expert told the New York Times, whether the findings could make a difference in people’s lives, and allow them to live longer independently, is not clear. But the report looks like an encouraging step forward.
More than 5.5 million Americans over 65 years old suffer from this cruel disease, costing $250 billion annually, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. And that number is projected to rise to 15 million Americans by 2050, at an unsustainable cost of $1 trillion. In New Hampshire, which has the third oldest population in the country, 25,000 people over 65 live with Alzheimer’s. State planners expect that number to jump by 37 percent in just six years.
The impact would be “a cataclysm that would rock New Hampshire families and New Hampshire’s budget,” U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster of Hopkinton wrote in a recent column for the Monitor. Kuster, who lost her mother, Susan McLane, to Alzheimer’s, has pushed Congress to increase federal funding for research aimed at prevention, and a cure.
“I know all too well the challenges of this disease,” Kuster wrote. “Its physical toll is matched only by the emotional and financial toll that Alzheimer’s takes on individuals suffering from the disease and their loved ones.”
Other trials of Alzheimer drug therapies have had a 99. 6 percent failure rate, compared to 20 percent success rates for cancer, according to published reports. It has been 15 years since a new treatment has been approved – and that therapy only addresses symptoms, in some people. All of us who, like the McLane family, have witnessed the ravages of Alzheimer’s understand that a “promising” study doesn’t guarantee an end result, and must be tested, and retested and the data strictly scrutinized.
Not surprisingly, Wall Street has plenty of interest in the development of a drug that would treat millions of patients, generating huge profits. With the best outcomes, and government approval, the drug, which would benefit patients with early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia, wouldn’t be available for 2 to 3 years, Biogen’s chairman told CNBC. And as to price? “It’s way too premature” to talk about that, he said. But clearly Wall Street is thinking about it. Obviously, family members, caregivers, and government regulators, should be too.
A “glimmer of hope” is how the Boston Globe headlined its front page story about the new data.
Faced with no hope at all, that’s something to hold on to, at least for now.