Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca Drop Two Late-Stage Alzheimer's Drug Trials -- Update
13 June 2018 - 1:30AM
Dow Jones News
By Preetika Rana and Peter Loftus
AstraZeneca PLC and Eli Lilly & Co. on Tuesday scrapped two
late-stage trials of an experimental Alzheimer's drug they were
codeveloping, the latest blow in the long quest to find a
breakthrough for the memory-robbing disorder.
The companies said the decision was taken after an independent
data monitoring committee concluded that trials associated with
lanabecestat, the experimental drug, wouldn't achieve their
original goals. The companies said the treatment wasn't working as
well as they had hoped and ending the trials wasn't a result of any
safety concerns.
An AstraZeneca spokesman said the two will continue to jointly
pursue an early-stage trial of another experimental Alzheimer's
drug. Lilly separately has other Alzheimer's compounds in clinical
trials, according to a company spokeswoman.
Current treatments for Alzheimer's can alleviate symptoms, but
don't slow the condition's underlying progression. The brain
disease affects an estimated five million Americans, and tens of
millions globally, but has been tough for the drug industry to
crack because scientists don't fully understand what causes it.
Pfizer Inc. in January said it would stop trying to discover new
drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Axovant Sciences
Ltd. and Biogen Inc. have also reported disappointing results from
Alzheimer's research.
Lanabecestat is known as a BACE inhibitor, aimed to prevent an
enzyme from producing the sticky substance known as amyloid that
builds up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Many drugmakers
have pursued the theory that targeting amyloid could slow or halt
the progression of Alzheimer's.
But another BACE inhibitor, from Merck & Co., failed last
year in a clinical trial of patients with mild to moderate
Alzheimer's.
Other drugs targeting amyloid in different ways also have failed
to help patients in trials over the past decade, including those
developed by Lilly, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson . The mounting
setbacks of amyloid-targeting drugs have raised doubts about that
approach.
Some companies have stuck with the amyloid hypothesis but have
tested such drugs in earlier stages of the disease, on the belief
that the older failed trials had patients whose disease was too
advanced to be helped. But the Merck drug also failed to help
patients with an earlier-stage form of the disease known as
prodromal Alzhiemer's, in a separate study that was halted earlier
this year.
Merck and other companies have also focused drug development on
a different protein, tau, that forms twisted proteins in the brains
of Alzheimer's patients.
Some companies say they will continue to look because the need
is high and a breakthrough could potentially reap big commercial
rewards. Lilly, which has spent three decades trying to find a
blockbuster and in 2016 shelved a different Alzheimer's compound it
spent $1 billion developing, said it was committed to further
research despite the latest setback.
"We won't give up on finding a solution for Alzheimer's
patients," Daniel Skovronsky, president of Lilly Research Labs,
said in the joint statement.
Indianapolis-based Lilly joined forces with the U.K.'s
AstraZeneca to co-develop lanabecestat in 2014. Lilly was
responsible for the two trials -- one for patients with early
Alzheimer's and the other for those suffering a milder form of the
disease -- while AstraZeneca agreed to take on manufacturing. More
than 3,000 patients were enrolled across the trials, which were
expected to conclude as early as next year, the AstraZeneca
spokesman said. Follow-on studies would have lasted until 2021.
Write to Preetika Rana at preetika.rana@wsj.com and Peter Loftus
at peter.loftus@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 12, 2018 11:15 ET (15:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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