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Medicines in Development for Alzheimer's Disease
Today, more than 5 million Americans are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, robbing them of their independence and even their identity. The disease ravages the minds of patients, crushes entire families and currently costs the health care system $172 billion a year—or 18 times more than the national cost of providing school lunches to poor children. Moreover, while huge, the figure does not include the personal costs to an estimated 11 million family members and friends who provide about 12 billion hours of unpaid care each year to those suffering from Alzheimer’s.
These sobering statistics are projected to get much worse as Americans in the baby boom generation age. The first of 76 million baby boomers will turn 65 this January. Their numbers will soon swell the elderly population, and thus the number of people prone to Alzheimer’s disease.
If no new medicines are found to prevent, delay or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the number of afflicted in America will jump to 13.5 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Costs for care for Alzheimer’s patients will increase five-fold to $1.08 trillion a year. That is about 25 times more than this year’s budget for the Department of Homeland Security.
Treatments and cures have been elusive for this complicated disease. Currently, five medications on the market temporarily reduce symptoms for some, but there is no vaccine to prevent Alzheimer’s or medicines to cure it or even delay onset or severity.
Hope for the future lies in medical innovation. America’s biopharmaceutical companies today have 98 medicines in the later stages of the pipeline, meaning they are either in clinical trials or awaiting FDA review.
Even modest progress can drastically change the trajectory, which some warn is like a “tsunami” headed our way. For example, a breakthrough that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by just five years would mean a significant drop in the number of Alzheimer’s patients. Instead of 13.5 million Americans suffering from the disease in 2050, the number would be 7.7—only a little more than today. Overall, a treatment to delay onset by five years would save the health care system $447 billion.
Most importantly, such a breakthrough would reduce an untold amount of suffering for patients and their families. The implications are global, as the net balance of the world’s elderly population grows by an estimated 847,000 a month.
America’s biopharmaceutical researchers are exploring various new pathways to attack this devastating disease.
Examples of new approaches to treating Alzheimer’s disease include:
- An oral medicine that inhibits the formation and accumulation of amyloid-beta protein deposits and may also reduce tau protein from forming neurofibrillary tangles in the brain.
- An intranasal medicine that is able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier is in development for mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. It has shown ability to reduce accumulation of both amyloid-beta and tau protein.
- A gene therapy for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms, such as short term memory loss, delivers a gene for nerve growth factor to the brain to prevent cell death and reverse memory loss.
- A vaccine that targets the amyloid-beta protein in the brain is designed to induce an immunde response with specificity versus a systemic immune response.
The quest is intense and financially risky. Each new medicine costs, on average, more than $1 billion and takes 10 to 15 years to develop. But new scientific advances are increasing our knowledge, and researchers are using every cutting-edge tool at their disposal. With continued dedication, we hope to make a difference for every person at risk of suffering from this terrible, debilitating disease.
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