Though some Big Pharma companies have invested heavily in Alzheimer’s research, not all drug makers think it makes financial sense to spend precious R&D dollars on developing treatments for the disease.
Clinical trials for Alzheimer’s drug treatments are growing costlier, reducing the incentive for pharma companies to conduct the studies, said Jessica Federer of Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, at a panel about Alzheimer’s disease at the Council for Foreign Relations. Bayer, a part of Bayer AG, is developing tools to diagnose the disease.
Research is expensive because it requires many patients to be followed for a long period of time. And the length of trials is only getting longer as the emphasis in the field shifts to diagnosing and treating patients earlier on in the course of the disease.
“It’s a very challenging environment to work in,” says Federer, a global advocacy manager who works with patient groups.
Perhaps instead of one-size-fit-all trial structure, Alzheimer’s drug development could be more similar to cancer, where certain patients such as those in the late stage of disease with with limited treatment options are given access to experimental treatments sooner, known as compassionate use, Federer told the Health Blog.
Another option is to increase the length of patent protection, she says. Currently companies get 20 years of protection from when the patent is first filed. But because drugs routinely take many years to develop with both animal and human testing before hitting the market, the medicines are frequently protected for less than 10 years before generic versions are permitted.
With Alzheimer’s, in order to demonstrate whether a drug actually prevents decline or slows down the disease’s progression, human trials themselves could take years and years in order to collect enough data to show that there is a treatment effect.
“If you want to do a 20- or 30-year trial, forget it,” Federer told the Health Blog.
Readers, what do you think?