The landscape of Alzheimer鈥檚 disease treatments is littered with once-promising medications that later failed to have much of an effect on the dementia disease.
But a new medication is being hailed as be a "game-changer" and 鈥渢he best news" in dementia research in decades.
The new drug, called aducanumab, is a human antibody that targets the sticky plaques made of beta-amyloid protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer鈥檚 patients.
The antibodies are given intravenously once a month, and latch onto the plaques, signalling the immune system to clear them away.
Researchers have just published in the the results of the first human trial of the drug, which enlisted 165 American patients in the early stages of dementia.
After just one year, patients receiving the highest doses of the drug saw their amyloid plaques significantly decreased.
More importantly, the researchers noted that those patients also experienced a 鈥渟lowing of clinical decline.鈥�
Study co-author Stephen Salloway, professor of neurology with Brown University, said the study results offer real hope to patients and families affected by Alzheimer鈥檚.
鈥淥verall, this is the best news we鈥檝e had in my 25 years of doing Alzheimer鈥檚 clinical research,鈥� he said in a press conference Tuesday.
Larry Chambers, scientific adviser with the Alzheimer鈥檚 Society of Canada, notes that the antibody is of human origin, as opposed to mouse origin, and seemed to be well tolerated by the patients in the study.
鈥淭he good news is that it seemed to be a safe drug and people were able to keep functioning,鈥� he told CTV News Channel Thursday.
This trial size was small and was primarily meant to assess the safety of aducanumab in humans. But larger, phase 3 trials could offer further insight into whether aducanumab really does help to arrest the decline of Alzheimer鈥檚.
Those trials are now recruiting 2,700 patients in 20 countries and expected to run until at least 2020.
