FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ACS News Service Weekly PressPac: June 03, 2015
Past failures pave way for promising new Alzheimer鈥檚 treatments
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Chemical & Engineering News
Since 2002, close to 300 drug candidates to treat Alzheimer鈥檚 have run into clinical dead ends. But now, having learned from those failures, researchers are testing 鈥� and retesting 鈥� a batch of the most promising compounds designed to slow the disease鈥檚 progression. An article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网, describes what made this possible and what lies ahead.
Lisa M. Jarvis, a senior correspondent at C&EN, reports that just a few years ago, Alzheimer鈥檚 research suffered from several high-profile setbacks. Experimental therapies, many of which targeted amyloid-尾 peptides, failed in clinical trials. The string of disappointments added to the already-existing doubt over whether amyloid-尾 was causing the disease. But researchers would later acknowledge that the clinical trials 鈥� and in some cases, drugs themselves 鈥� were fundamentally flawed.
Now equipped with better technologies and a better understanding of how the disease unfolds, several pharmaceutical companies are leading clinical trials to test new Alzheimer鈥檚 drug candidates that target either amyloid-尾 or tau, a protein also implicated in the condition. So far, early results are promising for patients with mild symptoms of the disease. Although the therapies don鈥檛 represent a cure, they signal long-awaited progress.