Curing What Ails Alzheimer’s Drug Development

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 candidates now in late-stage trials may well become the first...