Eli Lil­ly adds $23B in mar­ket cap as in­vestors rush on promise that this will be the amy­loid Alzheimer's drug that works

It’s been decades and dozens of drugs, and most of them failed, but the amy­loid hy­poth­e­sis won’t go gen­tly in­to the night.

While the world awaits the FDA’s de­ci­sion on Bio­gen’s con­tro­ver­sial ad­u­canum­ab pitch, a Big Phar­ma ri­val says they now have da­ta to sup­port their own amy­loid-clear­ing Alzheimer’s drug.

Eli Lil­ly said Mon­day that their be­ta amy­loid-tar­get­ing an­ti­body do­nanemab had re­duced the rate of de­cline in mod­er­ate Alzheimer’s pa­tients in a ran­dom­ized Phase II tri­al. Pa­tients who re­ceived the drug de­clined 32% more slow­ly than those on place­bo, as mea­sured by stan­dard di­ag­nos­tic scales for the con­di­tion, Lil­ly said. The com­pa­ny said the re­sults were sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant but didn’t dis­close a p-val­ue.

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