Alzheimer’s £30m research collaboration begins

The charity Alzheimer’s Research UK is setting up a £30m trio of new drug discovery institutes at Oxford and Cambridge universities and University College London, which will work with academic and industrial partners in Europe and elsewhere.

Simon Lovestone, scientific leader of the Oxford institute, outlined the programme at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This is the single largest Alzheimer’s drug discovery effort in the world,” he said. “I am confident that we will be successful.”

Professor Lovestone said the UK approach, using new methods to understand the complex molecular processes that destroy the brain as Alzheimer’s takes hold, would be far more productive than the failed drug trials undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry over the past decade.

He said companies had not come up with any product that stopped the Alzheimer’s process, in which toxic tau and amyloid proteins accumulate in the brain, despite spending $2bn on drug development.

The best current treatments may delay symptoms of cognitive deterioration for six to eight months in some patients, but do nothing for the underlying disease.

“The real problem with these [clinical] trials is not that the drugs failed, but that we learnt nothing new about the disease,” said Prof Lovestone. “It is more than a tragedy — it’s a scandal.”

He said the UK initiative would use personalised or “precision” medicine to find drugs tailored to individual patients in early stages of the disease, in contrast to the industry’s recent trials, which he called “a perfect example of imprecision medicine”.

They used the wrong drugs, antibodies aimed at amyloid proteins, which aimed at the wrong patients at the wrong stage of disease, he said.

The Alzheimer’s symposium at the AAAS meeting was chaired by Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, as part of an international campaign to promote the UK government’s two medical priorities: tackling dementia and antimicrobial drug resistance.

Another participant, Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco, agreed with Prof Lovestone’s characterisation of the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts so far.

“It is unconscionable that we have spent so much money and have almost nothing to show for it,” she said. “Great Britain has ignited this new worldwide effort — a multi-faceted approach with the patient at the centre.”

The dementia drug discovery institutes are inspired partly by the success of similar initiatives by cancer charities, which are starting to deliver new treatments to patients. “Dementia is playing catch-up with other areas of disease research and needs a step change,” said Prof Lovestone. 

Source The Financial