Eli Lilly and Co Shares Sink on Alzheimer’s Drug Failure

While solanezumab was clearly a long shot for Lilly, the lure of what some analysts suggested could be as much as $5 billion in sales potential for a drug that can tackle the underlying disease mechanism in Alzheimer’s proved to be very strong. The drug showed promise from preliminary results announced in September, though final results are still a while away.

In a company new release, Eli Lilly chairman, president, and CEO John Lechleiter said its Alzheimer’s program will now be reassessed. Lilly had high hopes that this compound could turn into a megablockbuster drug that would offer hope to the millions of patients around the world that suffer from this bad disease.

Yet, the results did not come as a complete surprise.

The failed drug is considered a awful blow for Alzheimer’s researchers, patients and their families. That includes solanezumab, which also failed in two previous large studies of people with mild-to-moderate forms of Alzheimer’s.

Lilly said Wednesday that it wouldn’t seek regulatory approval to market its experimental medication, known as solanezumab, for mild dementia, because it didn’t significantly slow down cognitive decline in patients with early disease.

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Researchers at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, are also trialling solanezumab, and another similar antibody made by Roche, in people who are now healthy but genetically fated to develop Alzheimer’s. Do you or a loved one have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease?

Solanezumab was based on the theory that a buildup of amyloid-beta plaque in a patient’s brain has an impact on cognition and leads to a disease. Dr. Eric Siemers, Medical Director of the Alzheimer’s disease Team at Eli Lilly had hoped that their agent, an amyloid antibody, would soak up enough of the circulating amyloid so that there weren’t enough fragments around to aggregate into the toxic plaques. Meanwhile, other companies in the space also dropped on the news. Inc., are testing drugs similar to solanezumab in an attempt to remove the protein.

To date, however, the field has been littered with failures.

Now that a widely anticipated Alzheimer’s medicine from Eli Lilly has failed a key test, a lot of attention is turning toward Biogen, which is developing its own compound to combat the notoriously hard-to-treat disease.

“There are other approaches that we need to pursue”, Carrillo said. “(Lilly) never seemed to have a great answer for why they picked the solanezumab dose they did”. Companies that make hardware and network devices skidded after printer and PC maker HP gave a weak profit forecast. Ricks in an interview with CNBC said Lilly needs to learn more about why the solanezumab trial failed.

The global trial involved 2,100 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease who were tracked for 18 months. “More specifics about the solanezumab drug, expected the night of December 9 during a meeting of the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD), could have repercussions for what’s called the “beta amyloid hypothesis” in Alzheimer’s disease treatments, which target protein fragments that some believe are responsible for the disease …”

Shares of Lilly shed 10.5 percent on Wednesday following the report. There aren’t any drugs that effectively slow the disease’s progression, just ones that treat its symptoms.

On behalf of the millions of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their families that we serve and represent, the Alzheimer’s Association is disappointed with the negative results of this clinical trial.

Salim Syed, biotech analyst at Mizuho Securities USA in NY, said Lilly’s Alzheimer’s setback might have unfairly reflected on a Biogen drug that continues to show promise.