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.