Beginning Of The End For Alzheimer's?

It was a breakthrough moment: the recent announcement that a new Alzheimer’s drug, the first for 20 years, has been approved for use in America. In this interview John Hardy, the British scientist behind it, explains what the development means for people who are suffering from the disease

- Tom Whipple

ALMOST four decades ago a desperate woman sent John Hardy a letter.

“Dear Sir,” Carol Jennings, from Nottingham in England, wrote in her careful handwriting. “I was very interested to read of your research in the Alzheimer’s Disease Society News and think my family could be of use.” Her 63-year-old father had Alzheimer’s, she said, “as does his sister, Audrey. His brother, Arthur, also may have the disease”.

Hardy remembers reading it.

“She said, ‘My doctor keeps telling me it doesn’t run in the family, but here’s my family tree, and it clearly does’.” Throughout her family were people who developed Alzheimer’s and did so in their 50s, and she wanted answers.”

This is the letter that launched a thousand studies, the letter that, in a roundabout way, led to investments worth billions. And recently, 35 years after Carol sent it and more than a decade after she started losing her mind – as she always feared she would – came a vindication of sorts.

It arrived in a factsheet for doctors produced by the US Food and Drug Administration in June, giving information on the country’s newest drug. “ADUHELM,” it began, “is an amyloid beta-directed antibody indicated for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.”

With that mundane opening sentence an experimental drug became a clinical one. The US regulators had, at last, approved a drug to treat Alzheimer’s – the first in 20 years.