The Brief Health - How A Discontinued Alzheimer's Drug Study Got A Second Life

“MY FIRST REACTION WAS TO BE ANGRY,” SAYS JOANN Wooding.

- Alice Park

“I’ve gotten over that, and frustration is more the word right now.” Wooding’s husband Peter, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, was among the more than 3,200 people with the disease who volunteered to test a promising drug called aducanumab. In earlier study results released the same year, the drug, developed by Biogen, a U.S. biotech company, and Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical manufacturer, seemed to accomplish a number of firsts for people with Alzheimer’s. It appeared to shrink deposits of the protein amyloid accumulating in the brains of patients and, perhaps more important, also slow the cognitive decline resulting from their buildup. No drug for the disease had shown such dramatic effects before. The study in which Peter was participating was one of two follow-up trials designed to confirm that early promise and, patients and doctors hoped, lead to the first approved treatment that could actually slow the progression of the neurodegenerative disease.

But last March, Biogen, after an early review of its data involving half the patients, decided the results were not promising enough to continue exposing patients to possible side effects and terminated the trial. Peter and the other volunteers stopped receiving infusions, and the company began a more in-depth analysis.

The resulting full report, which included all 3,285 patients, revealed a rosier picture. After 18 months of taking aducanumab, people in one of the studies showed anywhere from 15% to 27% less cognitive decline, as measured by standard tests of memory and cognitive ability, compared with those receiving a placebo. The cognitive protection was most pronounced in those getting the highest dose of the drug. On the basis of these results, the company plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration to approve aducanumab for the treatment of early Alzheimer’s disease.