Alzheimer’s: Promising drug Solanezumab fails clinical trial

Amyloid still plays some role, and it’s premature to abandon the notion of targeting it, said a specialist who has led many previous failed Alzheimer’s drug studies.

Brain of a 70-year old without Alzheimer’s (left) and brain of 70-year old with Alzheimer’s (right). It is characterized by the buildup in the brain of a protein called amyloid beta that clumps together to form sticky plaques between nerve cells.

Wall Street stocks retreated from records early Wednesday, with pharma shares tumbling following disappointing clinical results from Eli Lilly. Other companies, including Biogen Inc. and Merck & Co.

As bond yields rose, investors sold shares of real estate investment trusts, utilities, and companies that sell household goods. There aren’t any drugs that effectively slow the disease’s progression, just ones that treat its symptoms.

An estimated 850,000 people in the United Kingdom are thought to be living with dementia, with figures expected to rise to one million by 2025, and two million by 2050. Ricks in an interview with CNBC said Lilly needs to learn more about why the solanezumab trial failed.

Eli Lilly’s EXPEDITION3 trial was testing its experimental compound solanezumab as a treatment for mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease.

In fact, the company stated that the drug Solanezumab could not slow down cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer’s when compared to patients who took placebo, reports Herald Sun. Machinery and equipment makers climbed after strong results from Deere, but technology companies fell. The company reported a year ago that, in an early-stage trial, its lead Alzheimer’s drug, called aducanumab, slowed the mental decline of a small number of patients who had mild cases of the disease. No new safety signals were identified in the study.

Unfortunately, it turns out that solanezumab didn’t do any better in this subset of patients.

The main goal of the study was to test whether solanezumab slowed the decline in cognition versus a placebo.

“When you get a result like this you have to question, is it the stage of the disease, is it the particular drug you are testing, or is it some combination?”

Lilly noted on a November 23 call with reporters that some of the results “directionally favored” solanezumab, but did not go into detail on what that meant. Results are expected at a medical conference next month.

The financial cost of the failure is high.

Some analysts had said solanezumab, if approved, could eventually claim up to $10 billion in annual sales and boost Lilly’s earnings for years to come. He said earlier-stage trials results showed a 34 percent decline in slowing of cognitive functions. He now is president of Lilly Bio-Medicines.

“There are other approaches that we need to pursue”, Carrillo said.

“Bulls will argue that that [the Biogen drug] has the ability to clear amyloid plaques and [the Lilly drug] doesn’t and therefore the study failed because the drug failed to achieve its intended mechanism”, he wrote in his own investor note.

Within Eli Lilly’s results, some details even have positive hints for the beta amyloid hypothesis, said Evercore ISI’s John Scotti. “It suggests that the amyloid beta hypothesis seems correct and yet this eliminates an early competitor”. If true, that could mean that Biogen’s exciting product candidate aducanumab might also fail during late-stage clinical trials. But the developers kept studying it, trying to see if it maybe offered a small benefit when given to people early. “My concern is it’s so early it will be hard to target unless you have a drug that’s perfectly safe”.