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from the soon-forgotten-after-a-shaky-start dept.
Pfizer has announced that it will halt efforts to find new treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Meanwhile, Axovant Sciences will halt its studies of intepirdine after it failed to show any improvement for dementia and Alzheimer's patients. The company's stock price has declined around 90% in 3 months:
Pfizer has announced plans to end its research efforts to discover new drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The pharmaceutical giant explained its decision, which will entail roughly 300 layoffs, as a move to better position itself "to bring new therapies to patients who need them."
"As a result of a recent comprehensive review, we have made the decision to end our neuroscience discovery and early development efforts and re-allocate [spending] to those areas where we have strong scientific leadership and that will allow us to provide the greatest impact for patients," Pfizer said in a statement emailed to NPR.
[...] Despite heavily funding research efforts into potential treatments in the past, Pfizer has faced high-profile disappointment in recent years, as Reuters notes: "In 2012, Pfizer and partner Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) called off additional work on the drug bapineuzumab after it failed to help patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's in its second round of clinical trials."
Another potential treatment for neurodegenerative disorders — this one developed by Axovant, another pharmaceutical company — also found itself recently abandoned. The company dropped its experimental drug intepirdine after it failed to improve motor function in patients with a certain form of dementia — just three months after it also failed to show positive effects in Alzheimer's patients.
Looks like GlaxoSmithKline got a good deal when they sold the rights to intepirdine to Axovant Sciences in 2014.
Also at Bloomberg.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @10:18PM
Billions have been spent on the Alzheimer's problem with little to show for it so far. Pfizer may be better off letting someone else do the work if it turns out something more complicated than a drug is needed to treat or reverse Alzheimer's. Such as a biologic [wikipedia.org] or nanobot. AFAICT most of Pfizer's expertise [wikipedia.org] is in chemical drugs. Biotech startups [reuters.com] might be more likely to find the solution.
You can be sure that there will continue to be interest in curing Alzheimer's because it's an aging disease linked (not conclusively) to buildup of "extracellular junk". Therefore it is a major part of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence [wikipedia.org] and will attract Silicon Valley "new money". It could require something other than a drug to effectively cure it, such as a nanobot, and if anyone is going to start producing usable nanobots anytime soon, it is probably a Silicon Valley company.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]