Sixth in a line of Alzheimer’s drugs fails in trials
By 
Sarah Houlton2019-10-04T09:27:00
Treatments designed to stop amyloid peptide formation all seem to cause cognitive impairment rather than prevent it
In yet another setback for Alzheimer’s research, Biogen and Eisai have halted two Phase III clinical trials on the BACE (beta-amyloid cleaving enzyme, or beta-secretase 1) inhibitor elenbecestat in early-stage disease. It is the sixth BACE inhibitor to enter clinical trials, only to fail.
‘While there are differences in terms of toxicity among the different drugs, it appears there is a class effect that high-dose BACE inhibition causes cognitive worsening, the opposite of what we are trying to do,’ says Paul Aisen, director of the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute at the University of Southern California.