Lilly abandons late stage Alzheimer’s drug

Lilly is to abandon an Alzheimer’s drug in phase III development after results suggested it actually accelerated the disease rather than slowed its progress.

Interim results from the phase III trials show semagacestat worsened cognition and the ability of patients to perform daily tasks.

Moreover, the results also showed patients on the trial suffered an increased risk of skin cancer.

The two phase III IDENTITY trials involved around 2,600 patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The primary endpoint of both trials was to determine whether semagacestat would slow the decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease as compared with placebo.

Semagacestat works by blocking the production of beta amyloid plaques, which are thought to play a key role in the disease.

The drug is just the latest in a long line of treatments which have ultimately proved to be failures.

Lilly has another Alzheimer’s medicine solanezumab, which is also in phase III trials, but Lilly says this is not affected by the decision to abandon semagacestat.

The company has two further candidates in earlier stages of development, and these are also unaffected.

Chief executive John Lechleiter commented: “We are clearly disappointed by the results we are announcing today. However, Lilly’s innovation strategy, based on advancing a pipeline of nearly 70 molecules currently in clinical development, does not rest on the success or failure of any single compound.”

“Pharmaceutical research always carries risk, as these results show. Despite this and other recent setbacks, Eli Lilly remains financially strong and is even more determined to prevail in our quest to provide new treatments for Alzheimer’s and other serious diseases.”

Standard drug treatment for the condition are the cholinesterase inhibitors, including Pfizer/Eisai’s Aricept, but these drugs can only slow down the disease progression, and not halt or reverse it

Alzheimer’s disease is forecast to become one of the biggest disease burdens in the developed world as the population ages.  There are estimated to be around 30 million people with the condition worldwide, and this is forecast to rise to 100 million by 2050.

Ben Adams