EITHER lecanemab treatment reduces cognitive decline in patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease by 27%, according to preliminary results from clinical trials involving nearly 1,800 people, pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Biogen reported.
This new drug for Alzheimer’s is the first to clearly show in clinical trials that it slows disease progression.
The Japanese pharmaceutical group Eisai and the American Biogen announced this Tuesday that their treatment, Lecanemab, reduced cognitive decline in patients in the early stages of the disease.
These preliminary results come after clinical trials conducted in almost 1,800 peopleof which half received the treatment and the other half a placebo.
According to the companies, the drug reduced cognitive decline in 27% of patients treated over a period of 18 months.
Eisai and Biogen plan to publish the full results in a scientific journal and submit marketing authorization applications for the treatment in the United States, Japan, and Europe before the end of March 2023.
The drug’s benefits to patients “are modest but real” and therefore these results are “really encouraging,” said John Hardy, a professor of neuroscience at University College London.
If the data stands up to scrutiny, this is fantastic news.”
The treatment does not lead to “a cure”, but “slowing cognitive decline and thus preserving the possibility of carrying out normal daily activities is already a great victory”, he stressed.
The drug, however, will have to be examined “with regard to the risks of side effects” detected, “including inflammation and bleeding in the brain,” warned Charles Marshall of Queen Mary University of London.
In any case, the results show that attacking amyloid plaques in the brain, as Lecanemab does, “deserves continued exploration as a treatment strategy”he added.
Alzheimer’s patients have protein plaques, called amyloid, that form around their neurons and eventually destroy them.
But the precise role of these plaques in the disease, whether they are the cause or the consequence of other phenomena, is increasingly the subject of debate in the scientific community.
Another treatment from the US laboratory Biogen, called adhelm and also targeting amyloid plaques, raised high hopes in 2021 as it is the first drug approved in the United States against the disease since 2003.
But it also generated controversy, since the US drug agency (FDA) opposed the opinion of an expert committee, which judged that the treatment had not sufficiently demonstrated its effectiveness during clinical trials.
The FDA later restricted its use to only people with mild cases of the disease.
Source: Observadora
