New Alzheimer’s treatment?
It hasn’t yet reached the NZ media yet, but there’s another claimed Alzheimer’s treatment out there. Vox and Quartz have good pieces on it.
A company called Biogen is studying a compound called BAN2401, and presented results at a major scientific conference. Like a lot of robustly unsuccessful treatments, BAN2401 attempts to remove amyloid protein before it can form plaques. However, in a Phase II (small) trial people getting BAN2401 had slower decline in cognitive symptoms than people getting placebo.
Lots of potential drugs appear successful in Phase II trials but end up washing out in larger (‘phase III’) trials. On the other hand, the results for BAN2401 are unusually promising for an Alzheimer’s treatment — mostly, these get headlines based just on biochemical improvements, not actual patient-visible benefits.
Based on the history of clinical trials, the odds that BAN2401 will really turn out useful can’t be any higher than even money. But, for a change, they might not be all that much lower, either.
Update: actually, it appears that the placebo group randomly ended up with more patients having the main genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s, APOE4, so that’s another reason to be less hopeful about the results being confirmed
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »