dimebon: Pfizer, Medivation’s Drug Fails
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Pfizer Inc. and Medivation Inc. said Dimebon, their experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease, failed to benefit patients in an advanced study.Recently dimebolin has attracted renewed interest after being shown to have positive effects on persons suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
The trial, dubbed Connection, included almost 600 patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease from across the U.S., Europe and South America. The results counter a small, earlier study conducted in Russia that found patients getting Dimebon improved across five areas, including thinking, memory, activities of daily living, behavior and overall function.
The negative results for Dimebon, a 27-year-old hay fever treatment, are the latest setback in efforts to find a way to slow the most common form of dementia in elderly people. It could have generated more than $5 billion in annual sales if it proved effective, said Raghuram Selvaraju, head of health-care research at Hapoalim Securities USA Inc., in New York.
“We are surprised and disappointed,” said David Hung, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Medivation, in a telephone interview. “We’re trying to figure out what happened in the study and decide how to move forward. This is obviously one battle in our war against Alzheimer’s disease.”
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The trial, dubbed Connection, included almost 600 patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease from across the U.S., Europe and South America. The results counter a small, earlier study conducted in Russia that found patients getting Dimebon improved across five areas, including thinking, memory, activities of daily living, behavior and overall function.
The negative results for Dimebon, a 27-year-old hay fever treatment, are the latest setback in efforts to find a way to slow the most common form of dementia in elderly people. It could have generated more than $5 billion in annual sales if it proved effective, said Raghuram Selvaraju, head of health-care research at Hapoalim Securities USA Inc., in New York.
Earlier, Dimebolin is an orally-active small molecule compound that has been shown to inhibit brain cell death in preclinical studies of Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease, making it a potential treatment for these and other neurodegenerative diseases. Research suggests that it may also have cognition-enhancing effects in healthy individuals, in the absence of neurodegenerative disease pathology.
“We are surprised and disappointed,” said David Hung, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Medivation, in a telephone interview. “We’re trying to figure out what happened in the study and decide how to move forward. This is obviously one battle in our war against Alzheimer’s disease.”
Alzheimer's disease (AD), also called Alzheimer disease, Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (SDAT) or simply Alzheimer's, is the most common form of dementia. Generally, it is diagnosed in people over 65 years of age,although the less-prevalent early-onset Alzheimer's can occur much earlier. In 2006, there were 26.6 million sufferers worldwide. Alzheimers is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050.
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