Big Pharma's years-long battle to find a treatment, if not a cure, for Alzheimer's has been marked by numerous defeats.
Experts say that, if a treatment for Alzheimer's isn't developed, the disease could end up costing around $1 trillion annually by 2050 – with an estimated 13 million people in the U.S. suffering from Alzheimer's, compared to five million today.
There are dozens of early-stage Alzheimer's drugs in clinical trials right now – and most are expected to fail.
"There are 100 trials of about 80 drugs currently in the pipeline," Jeffrey Cummings, director of the a Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, recently told the FierceBiotech.com
The industry website also noted that research into late-stage Alzheimer's has yielded nearly nothing for the big pharmaceutical corporations.
“Eli Lilly's (NYSE: LLY) solanezumab and bapineuzumab at Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) both failed spectacularly in Phase III tests,” the website said said. “And while the companies continue to plug away--Lilly has a new study focused on solanezumab in earlier-stage Alzheimer's patients--the R&D arena has racked up a whopping 99.6% clinical trial failure rate, according to Cummings' review of the trial data from 2002 to 2012.”
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On Monday, meanwhile, North Carolina-based Targacept (NASDAQ: TRGT) formally abandoned its clinical trial of an Alzheimer's drug in its pipeline.
“We are disappointed for Alzheimer’s disease patients and their families,” Targacept CEO Stephen Hill said in a statement.
“We designed a rigorous study to provide a definitive answer on whether TC-1734 could be a better treatment option than the current standard of care,” he added, “in what has been a very difficult disease area for the development of novel therapeutics.”
And yet, given the potential rewards for a successful Alzheimer's treatment, the research continues.
Earlier this week, Novartis (NYSE: NVS) announced that, pending regulaory approval, it plans a study in Europe an North America starting next year, to see if two of its drugs can prevent the disease in people who have a genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's.
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