Why pursuit of meaningful Alzheimer’s therapies is gathering pace
In World Alzheimer’s Month, expert Peter Schüler reflects on the potential implications of new Alzheimer’s therapies on the research landscape.
World Alzheimer’s Month offers an opportunity to reflect on the progress made in the search of effective treatments for this enormously burdensome disease and align our visions for the future. This year, there is much progress to consider as we expect two further medicines, donanemab and lecanemab, to come to market. These drugs offer more treatment alternatives to aducanumab as disease-modifying (DM) treatments in addition to the long-existing symptomatic therapies. In addition to slowing the progression of the disease by 25-35% per year, the successful developments of these drugs provided some additionally encouraging results – namely that the countless disappointments in the past 20 years have led to valuable lessons learned which, in turn, helped to refine the methodologies for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) drug development.
NR entrepreneur: “We never set out to ‘crack the NHS’, we set out to help people. Start with that”
Entrepreneur Ian Pearce shares the lessons he learned on the journey to establishing his innovation, Neuro ProActive, within the NHS.
My journey for the last six years has been interesting. After my father had a stroke, I experienced a lot of the frustrations that hundreds of thousands of people do each year. It seemed to me that while many of these challenges needed basic solutions, those challenges were numerous and long standing. In late 2017, while having a shower, I started to think about a single digital platform which would be all encompassing for NHS and private practice clinicians, as well as patients and family members. Most of my best ideas happen in the bathroom. It’s the only place where men can multi-task and escape young children. For any potential supplier to want to “crack” the NHS, I’d make two points. Firstly, this is the wrong mindset. The NHS doesn’t want to be “cracked”. Secondly, it’s a huge mistake to see the NHS as one organisation. It’s also important to appreciate that the views in this article are my own, based on my experiences over a five-year period.
Recognising the role of the support worker
While support workers play a key role in care and rehab provision, do they really have the profile and recognition they deserve? Lucy Fallon, co-founder of Ariya Neuro Care, discusses how to build a culture that properly appreciates these professionals and enables them to thrive In a multi-disciplinary team, we all have our role to play. To ensure we deliver the person-centred care we aspire to, a quality partnership must be built so everyone can work together for the good of the client. Within this team is the valuable and actually quite vital role of the support workers. The ones who tie together the rehabilitation, who are the ‘ever presents’ on the ground delivering the round-the-clock care, and really being at the forefront of the whole team effort. But often, the role of the support worker is not valued as it should be. While they are playing a key role in the MDT, their contribution can be seen as ‘less important’ than others. This is not new, and is something that persists - but is something that can be damaging to the support worker, their ability to do their job, to the work of the whole team, and to the rehab a client receives.
My journey: Delivering person-centred neuroscience – from a van
By Neil Bindemann, neuroimmunologist and founder of the Person-Centred Neurosciences [...]
