Hit-and-miss PhI­I­Is leave Lund­beck and Ot­su­ka’s lat­est Alzheimer’s pro­gram in a pre­car­i­ous po­si­tion

Sev­en months af­ter Lund­beck and Ot­su­ka re­port­ed a Phase III flop for their Alzheimer’s drug idalopir­dine, the part­ners are back with a hit-and-miss score on eas­ing Alzheimer’s ag­i­ta­tion for their block­buster ther­a­py Rex­ul­ti (br­ex­pipra­zole).

Al­ready ap­proved for schiz­o­phre­nia and ma­jor de­pres­sion, the col­lab­o­ra­tors were look­ing for the first ap­proval of an an­tipsy­chot­ic specif­i­cal­ly for ag­i­ta­tion trig­gered by Alzheimer’s de­men­tia, a con­di­tion that af­flicts mil­lions of peo­ple in the US and mil­lions more world­wide. Ag­i­ta­tion can be ex­pressed in many ways, run­ning from wan­der­ing to ag­gres­sive be­hav­ior.

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