Alois Alzheimer's microscope and childhood home (Eli Lilly)
Failure, faith and $8 billion: How Lilly's amyloid conviction brought it to the brink of Alzheimer's approval
Twenty-nine years ago, Eli Lilly bought an old, ivy-covered brick house in Marktbreit, Germany.
The house was the childhood home of Alois Alzheimer, who had peered through his microscope and discovered suspicious looking plaques in samples of brains ravaged by dementia. Nearly a century later, in 1995, Lilly’s executives had high hopes for an experimental therapy that boosted brain receptors involved in learning and memory, and its scientists were hard at work on other pills that would stop Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks.
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