Alzheimer's Drugs
26 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's and 106 million could be afflicted by 2050.
Any treatment that alters the course of the disease would quickly become a multi-billion-dollar drug. To date, most Alzheimer's researchers have pursued compounds that would clear out toxic clumps of a protein call amyloid that clog the brains of Alzheimer's victims. One amyloid drug after another has failed in trials.
Dr. Claude Wischik, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, rejects amyloid as a cause of Alzheimer's. He has long studied another protein, Tau, which masses into tangles in diseased brains. In 1988, he tried to dye these tangles in a test tube with an old malaria drug, methylene blue, to make them more visible. Instead, the tangles dissolved.
Wischik spent the next two decades figuring out why that happened, and in 2002 he formed TauRx Therapeutics, a private company based in Singapore. TauRx just reported that its drug "Rember" reduced mental decline by 81% over 12 months in a small phase II trial. The results have yet to be published and need to be confirmed by a larger trial. But so far, Rember has outperformed high-profile Alzheimer's drugs made by far larger companies. And it works by going after a completely different target.
Source: BusinessWeek, August 18, 2008
Subscribe to this blog
