Alzheimer’s disease gaining recognition as researchers and pharma companies work to find therapy

WORLD– According to World Health Organization (WHO), Alzheimer’s disease attributes to around 60-70 % cases of dementia cases globally.

WHO projects that by the year 2030, 82 million cases of Dementia will be recorded which will nearly double by the year 2050 hence more cost of treatment which currently stands at US$818Bper annum, equivalent to 1.1% of global gross domestic product (GDP).

The disease currently has no cure and has prompted researchers and pharma-based companies to work a way on how to develop its therapy as also a measure to cut on its cost of treatment.

Just within this week, two companies have been on the spotlight with innovations skewed towards finding therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, Leucadia Therapeutics and Biogen.

Leucadia Therapeutics Inc, a California HealthTech Company, launched an App, ProCogny, that will help patients exercise memory and cognition as well as have a personalized memory tracker.

ProCogny will allow users to play memory-intensive puzzles and games, daily Brain Boost collections of mini-puzzles, and a non-clinical version of the Leucadia Memory Test (LMT).

Leucadia’s team developed ProCogny to assess memory and cognition in their Alzheimer’s disease study (projectcribrose.com). So many participants raved about the games that the team added some in-house AI to produce ProCogny Memory Tracker.

The App includes LMT and games and puzzles that exercise different facets of memory, such as word recall, reasoning, alternating tasks, matching, object recognition, pattern recognition, and spatiotemporal memory.

Daily Brain Boosts are rotating collections of mini-puzzles tailored to focus on areas that users had problems within the LMT, but customization requires a monthly subscription.

Separately, Biogen and Eisai (Japanese based pharma company), recently had they jointly made drug, Aduhelm granted accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug Association (FDA).

ADUHELM (aducanumab-avwa) will be the first and only Alzheimer’s disease treatment to address a defining pathology of the disease by reducing amyloid beta plaques in the brain.

The accelerated approval has been granted based on data from clinical trials demonstrating the effect of ADUHELM on reducing amyloid beta plaques, a biomarker that is reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit, in this case a reduction in clinical decline.

Continued approval for ADUHELM’s indication as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease may be contingent upon verification of clinical benefit in confirmatory trial(s).