Why have so many Alzheimer’s drugs failed in the past 40 years?
It has now been 112 years since Dr. Alois Alzheimer first discovered amyloid plaques in the brain of Auguste Deter during an autopsy, and we still don’t have a treatment. Currently, there are several drugs on the market, but these are classed as symptom-modifying drugs, which cannot alter the course of the disease and are only effective for 3-6 months.
There’s a real need for a disease-modifying or therapeutic drug that can go to the heart of the problem, treat the patients, and help to prevent or kill the disease.
The reason we call it 40 years, despite Alzheimer’s being first reported 112 years ago, is because it wasn’t until 1978 that the United States’ National Institute of Health (NIH) began funding research into Alzheimer’s disease.
Back in the early 1970s, Alzheimer’s disease was considered a hopeless and untreatable condition. At that time, many doctors believed that this disease is a disease of aging, and thus, there was no point in researching the condition.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.