The landscape of Alzheimer’s disease treatments is littered with once-promising medications that later failed to have much of an effect on the dementia disease.
But a new medication is being hailed as be a "game-changer" and “the best news" in dementia research in decades.
The new drug, called aducanumab, is a human antibody that targets the sticky plaques made of beta-amyloid protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.
The antibodies are given intravenously once a month, and latch onto the plaques, signalling the immune system to clear them away.
Researchers have just published in the journal Nature the results of the first human trial of the drug, which enlisted 165 American patients in the early stages of dementia.
After just one year, patients receiving the highest doses of the drug saw their amyloid plaques significantly decreased.
More importantly, the researchers noted that those patients also experienced a “slowing of clinical decline.”
Study co-author Stephen Salloway, professor of neurology with Brown University, said the study results offer real hope to patients and families affected by Alzheimer’s.
“Overall, this is the best news we’ve had in my 25 years of doing Alzheimer’s clinical research,” he said in a press conference Tuesday.
Larry Chambers, scientific adviser with the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada, notes that the antibody is of human origin, as opposed to mouse origin, and seemed to be well tolerated by the patients in the study.
“The good news is that it seemed to be a safe drug and people were able to keep functioning,” he told CTV News Channel Thursday.
This trial size was small and was primarily meant to assess the safety of aducanumab in humans. But larger, phase 3 trials could offer further insight into whether aducanumab really does help to arrest the decline of Alzheimer’s.
Those trials are now recruiting 2,700 patients in 20 countries and expected to run until at least 2020.
