Fo­cus­ing on ge­net­i­cal­ly de­fined pop­u­la­tion still could­n't save Eli Lil­ly, Roche's an­ti-amy­loid Alzheimer's drugs

Nei­ther Eli Lil­ly or Roche got any clos­er to prov­ing their an­ti-amy­loid ther­a­pies have a shred of val­ue in the fight against Alzheimer’s as they dis­closed topline re­sults from a Phase II/III study in­volv­ing pa­tients with a rare in­her­it­ed form of the dis­ease.

Com­pared to the drug­mak­ers’ pre­vi­ous failed tri­als, DI­AN-TU was a small, cus­tomized ef­fort that ran long. In­ves­ti­ga­tors at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St Louis fol­lowed 194 par­tic­i­pants — out of 490 ran­dom­ized to re­ceive Lil­ly’s solanezum­ab, Roche’s gan­tenerum­ab or place­bo — for an av­er­age of 5 years and in some cas­es up to 7 years. They even tai­lor-made a com­pos­ite end­point com­pris­ing sev­er­al cog­ni­tive as­sess­ments to suit this group of peo­ple with ge­net­ic mu­ta­tions known to cause ear­ly on­set Alzheimer’s, some of whom may not have had symp­toms when they en­rolled in the tri­al.

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