The implications of Dimebon Phase III failure - Expert independent analyst's comment

Phase III failure last week for Medivation/Pfizer's Dimebon (latrepirdine) is a major setback, however hope remains for Alzheimer's sufferers and their carers, says Ben Greener, lead health care analyst at Datamonitor.

When Dimebon failed to achieve clinical benefit over placebo in one of its pivotal Phase III trials, the result came as a surprise to many of those that had been tracking the drug's progress (The Pharma Letter March 4). The drug, which had received such encouraging Phase II results that they were published in the Lancet, was purported to be a future blockbuster.

'Whilst at Datamonitor we had forecast that Dimebon could achieve annual sales of around $5 billion in the seven major markets by 2018, some of the experts we interviewed had been skeptical about the Phase II trials. When announcing the launch of these most recent trials, Medivation themselves even conceded that the Phase II results may have been limited by a small sample size, involvement of just one geographical location and the use of only one language to communicate disease severity,' said Mr Greener.