Eli Lilly’s Alzhimer’s drug fails final clinical trial

23, 2016, that its potential Alzheimers treatment, solanezumab, failed in another large clinical study, ending hope that researchers had finally found a drug that can slow the fatal, mind-robbing disease.

The news sent Lilly shares tumbling 10% in afternoon trading in New York Wednesday; earlier in the day the stock had its biggest one-day drop since August 2000. The scientists had hoped that the Alzheimer’s drug Solanezumab would destroy the rogue proteins in the brain and slow the progress of the degenerative disease.

Alzheimer’s drugs have a failure rate of more than 99 percent. It had already failed in two large studies in people with mild-to-moderate forms of the disease.

However, the top-line data from the trial showed that patients who took solanezumab did not display a statistically significant slowing of cognitive decline when compared to patients who only received a placebo.

“As far back as”.

While this is certainly a development that investors need to watch closely, it is possible that Eli Lilly’s failure could actually be a net positive for Biogen.

While the approach is intriguing, solanezumab is not a new drug.

Do you or a loved one have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease? For example, another protein Tau forms toxic tangles in brain cells. The outcome adds to a long list of promising Alzheimer’s drugs that have flopped in the clinic, many of which, like solanezumab, targeted amyloid proteins. Other companies, including Biogen Inc. and Merck & Co.

A drug trial that many had hoped would treat Alzheimer’s disease has failed in its major clinical trial, a heartbreaking setback for those suffering or caring for someone suffering the disease. While there was a suggestion that patients getting solanezumab may have done better than those given a placebo, the difference wasn’t meaningful, and Lilly threw in the towel for that patient group. Yet, when Lilly reported the consequences of those trials in 2012, the organization said the medication had an impact in a subset of patients with mellow side effects. “(Lilly) never seemed to have a great answer for why they picked the solanezumab dose they did”.

Eli Lilly and Company is headquartered in Indianapolis.

Eli Lilly has also been running “prevention” trials to see whether solanezumab might be able to stop people at particularly high genetic risk of Alzheimer’s from getting the disease. In that trial, patients who had scored between 16 and 26 on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) cognitive impairment test had been enrolled.

Further findings from the three-study trial will be presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting on December 8 at 9:15 p.m. “We have five other therapeutic agents in early stages of development”, said Lechleiter, who is retiring at the end of the year.

“We’ll continue to go forward, it’s just not as fast as we would like”, Eric Siemers, a lead Alzheimer’s researcher at Lilly, told reporters Wednesday. Current Alzheimer’s treatments like Aricept and Namenda only temporarily ease symptoms such as memory loss, confusion and agitation.

Alzheimer’s disease affects close to 5-million Americans.

Lilly has spent about $3 billion over the past 27 years on Alzheimer’s research. “We don’t know the answer”. First, we’ve only really understood what Alzheimer’s is in the last 20 years, after we developed the technology to probe inside the brain.