Look back at pharma news to July 29

Drugs that currently exist to treat Alzheimer’s only relieve symptoms temporarily and they don’t work in all patients. Among the 244 Alzheimer’s drugs tested in clinical trials between 2002 and 2012, memantine from Eli Lilly, succeeded. However, last week a little known UK company – TauRx – came up with mixed results on its candidate that could nevertheless provide hope for some Alzheimer’s patients.

According to Andy Porter, professor of medical biotechnology and director of the Scottish Biologics Facility, the University of Aberdeen, we are used to, almost accepting of, the ‘spin’ we experience from politicians. Today we see the biotech spin-doctors get to work after Aberdeen’s flag ship biotech TauRx reported that its drug LMTX “failed to meet its primary end-points” in an Alzheimer’s patient Phase III drug trial, commented. In layman’s terms this means that the drug fell at the last hurdle of its 15 year research journey as it unfortunately did not work in the way it was hoped or expected, said Prof Porter in The Press and Journal.

In TauRx’s trial there are an exciting sub-set of patients that were at an early stage in their disease (mild to moderate) that responded exceedingly well to LMTX as a drug on its own (monotherapy) showing all the signs of a slowing in disease progression, with improvements in cognitive function and the brains’ appearance when scanned .