You may have heard: AN ALZHEIMER’S DRUG ACTUALLY HAD A POSITIVE TRIAL!!! The news on Biogen/Eisai’s lecanemab was “exciting,” “shocking,” or at least “promising,” depending on your media outlet of choice. However, just because we set the bar almost impossibly low after the train wreck of the FDA’s approval for Biogen’s similar Alzheimer’s med, Aduhelm, I don’t think we should be pumping up the hype machine for this modestly positive outcome with lecanemab.
So, to remind everyone: the modest 27% improvement reported is Biogen’s best shot at promoting their product. What about linked secondary outcomes like cognitive scores and brain scans which were only disclosed to be statistically significant without further details? I am going out on a limb to guess that when the Big Reveal comes next month at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Congress, they are going to be even less exciting, shocking, and promising.
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Related on the SLP
The big picture is that Alzheimer’s dementia is most likely a highly complex and individually variable inter-related mix, including genetic influences, metabolic and cardiovascular disease, psychologic health, and neuroinflammation. Beta-amyloid proteins folding up into plaques probably fits in there somewhere. Harnessing antibodies to erase amyloid plaques long after their creation is probably not the Holy Grail medicine seeks.
