Joe Freshman is 14 years old and has never known a new Alzheimer’s disease (AD) treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Study leaders hope that he’ll see one before returning from winter break, but one Penn Memory Center researcher cautions that a new FDA-approved drug alone isn’t necessarily “the answer to our prayers.”
Pharmaceutical company Lilly is testing the drug Solanezumab, designed to target amyloid, which physicians and researchers think is at least partially responsible for AD. Results of this study will be released by the end of 2016, and if the results indicate that this drug helps patients, “Alzheimer’s doctors will have a new drug to prescribe and also a new way to talk about the disease,” PMC Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish wrote in his latest Forbes column.
“When this happens, Alzheimer’s disease will gain a business model. Thought leaders will assemble, advertisements will flourish, and the media will start spreading the news: We finally have a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease,” Karlawish wrote.
But Solanezumab is not the first drug to ignite excitement in the field of Alzheimer’s disease medicine. Karlawish explains how the the cholinergic hypothesis about Alzheimer’s fueled interest in acetylcholinesterase inhibitor drugs in the 1990s. Many people at the time believed that neurological disorders could be treated through modulation of neurotransmitters at the synaptic level.
He references an essay that argues amyloid isn’t the whole story when it comes to AD.
“Amyloid isn’t Alzheimer’s disease in the same way that the poliovirus is polio, and so we shouldn’t expect that a drug such as sola is the answer to our prayers,” Karlawish wrote. “The history of the cholinergic hypothesis shows, however, that not only science but belief influences medical practice.”
Further, Karlawish argues that studies must follow a large number of subjects for years to measure the true impact of new drugs.
“Without these kinds of studies, the public won’t know the value of what they’re buying and taking,” he wrote.
Read the complete column at www.forbes.com.
— by Darby Marx