Eli Lilly and Co is not giving up on creating a drug which may help treat Alzheimer’s disease despite the failures it had encountered on previous trials. The pharmaceutical had announced on Friday that another trial will be launched but this time focusing only on patients with mild conditions.
Those who will volunteer on the trial will not have to worry about liver failures and other complications which may be caused by the drug because the company will be doing pre-screening first. Each participant will be screened using an imaging agent Amyvid to ensure that there is an actual presence of the protein beta amyloid linked to the disease. It will also determine if the patient has a mild condition or not.
The patients will still be given the same drug named Solanezumab which was designed to block the beta amyloid that forms plaques in the brain which triggers the disease. There will be no changes on the formulation.
Previous trials made by Lilly involving patients with mild and moderate conditions showed a 34 percent improvement on mild patients or those on stage 3 of the disease.
The Alzheimer’s Association describes ‘mild’ as stage 3 of the disease wherein people around the patient will notice difficulties such as coming up with the right word or name, forgetting work materials after reading it, misplacing or losing important things, and having difficulties planning or organizing tasks.
Lilly announced that the new Phase III trial will involve 2,100 patients with stage 3 conditions. This is higher than the 1,300 headcount they had on previous trials.
"Since Lilly saw a signal of benefit in the mild patients in the completed trials, it makes a lot of sense for them to simply zoom in on that group in this new trial," said Steven Ferris, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York in Reuters Health. "It's a roll of the dice again, but they'll get a definitive answer."
This may be another risk that Lilly has to take but it may be worth the risk as no treatments were successfully made that could help slow the progression of the disease which usually affects people aged 65 and above.
