Treatment with lecanemab reduces the cognitive decline of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease by 27%, according to preliminary results of clinical trials involving nearly 1,800 people, the pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Biogen reported.
This new Alzheimer’s drug is the first to clearly show in clinical trials that it slows the progression of the disease, causing cognitive decline in 27% of treated patients over an 18-month period in the early stages of the disease. is reduced.
These preliminary results come after clinical trials involving nearly 1,800 people, half of whom received the treatment and the other half a placebo.
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 by the end of March 2023.
The drug’s benefits for patients “are modest but real,” and these results are therefore “really encouraging,” said John Hardy, a professor of neuroscience at University College London.
“If the data stands up to scrutiny, this is fantastic news,” said Tara Spires-Jones of the University of Edinburgh.
The treatment does not lead to a “cure”, but “slowing down cognitive decline and thus preserving the ability to perform normal daily activities is already a big win,” he stressed.
However, the drug will need to be researched “with regard to the risks of side effects”, “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 plaques of proteins called amyloids that form around their neurons and eventually destroy them.
But the precise role of these plaques in disease, whether the cause or the result of other phenomena, is increasingly debated in the scientific community.
Another treatment from the US lab Biogen, called Aduhelm and also targeting amyloid plaques, raised much hope in 2021, as it was the first drug approved in the United States for the disease since 2003.
But it also caused controversy, as the U.S. Drugs Agency (FDA) went against the advice of an expert committee, which found that the treatment had not sufficiently demonstrated its effectiveness during clinical trials.
Later, the FDA limited its use to only people with mild cases of the disease.
Source: DN
