The New New
Why Drugs for Alzheimer’s Are So Hard to Develop
As rates of the illness increase, there’s urgency around the few new treatments still in the running
Finding treatments for Alzheimer’s disease is simultaneously one of the most pressing and difficult tasks in medicine today. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of deaths resulting from Alzheimer’s has shot up by 123 percent. Today, around one in 10 people over age 65 have the disease. The drugs available for Alzheimer’s aim to ease symptoms of the disease, but they cannot slow or reverse its progression. The last time a new medication was approved for Alzheimer’s was 15 years ago.
Over the course of Alzheimer’s progression, sticky deposits of protein structures called plaques and tangles build up in the brain and damage and kill nerve cells. Proteins called amyloid-β and tau comprise these plaques and tangles and function improperly in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Drugs to combat Alzheimer’s often try to target these proteins.
But in recent years, Alzheimer’s drugs in clinical testing have largely failed to produce adequate results. There are, however, a handful of promising options still in the running. David Geldmacher, a neurologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is working on a phase three…
