April 18, 2023
A growing number of start-up companies are pursuing alternative strategies in drug development for patients with Alzheimer’s disease that bypass the beta amyloid hypothesis that has dominated the field for decades.
Although the major manifestations of AD are global cognitive decline and loss of independent function, accessory symptoms include aberrant accumulation of intra- and extracellular proteins, neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and compromised neurotransmission. Sharon L. Rogers, CEO, at AmyriAD Therapeutics, laments that the AD drug development field has focused on disease-modifying therapies at the expense of individual symptom-modifying therapies.
“There are 74 disease-modifying therapies in the developmental pipeline versus only 46 symptom-modifying therapies,” says Rogers. “In pharma, we are reconciled to the idea that we don’t cure much, we manage things and usually we manage disease with a variety of agents. It is time for us to look at AD as a chronic disease that needs to have that kind of disease management. Disease management combined with disease modification is the future of AD treatment.”
Read the full article: Moving Beyond Amyloid in Alzheimer’s Therapeutics | GEN Biotechnology (liebertpub.com)