It’s over: Eli Lil­ly shares tank af­ter its huge gam­ble on Alzheimer’s drug solanezum­ab ends in fail­ure

Eli Lil­ly’s mon­u­men­tal ef­fort to prove once and for all that solanezum­ab could work in de­lay­ing Alzheimer’s has end­ed in to­tal fail­ure. The phar­ma gi­ant an­nounced this morn­ing that the drug failed its third Phase III ef­fort at Lil­ly, send­ing its stock in­to a tail­spin.

Back in 2012, in­ves­ti­ga­tors for Lil­ly con­vinced the top ex­ecs at the com­pa­ny that they had seen re­al, tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits for ear­ly-stage pa­tients tak­ing the drug, de­signed to elim­i­nate de­posits of amy­loid be­ta in the brain. The da­ta, they felt, war­rant­ed an­oth­er clin­i­cal odyssey in Phase III, even though that study had failed. And CEO John Lech­leit­er was a stout ad­vo­cate through­out, will­ing to in­vest heav­i­ly in the study. But in the end, the drug of­fered noth­ing but false hope to mil­lions of pa­tients, fail­ing to bend the curve on cog­ni­tive de­clines or the abil­i­ty of pa­tients to func­tion bet­ter.

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