Note: Today's blog is from the very talented Nicole Gray, formerly a reporter for BioPharmaDive and now an independent journalist who is covering and commenting on the passage and implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act in terms of how it will affect the patient groups that supported it. Of note is the role The Critical Path Institute will play in ensuring that many of the objectives enshrined in the legislation are realized.
Yesterday the Alzheimer’s Association was one of hundreds of patient/disease advocacy groups celebrating passage of the Cures Act. From the beginning, when Representatives Fred Upton and Diane DeGette introduced the bill in May 2015, the association rallied long and hard for this legislation, driven by the sense of urgency around Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—the leading cause of death from a disease that can’t be prevented or cured; the most expensive disease in the U.S. and a disease associated with a tremendous personal burden borne by patients and their families.
When Lilly canceled the solanezumab development program last month, it was disappointing, but not a complete surprise. Unlike oncology, AD drug development has been a battlefield where there have been very few victories.
Between 2000 and 2012, there were 413 AD trials, including 83 phase III trials. While some of these studies tested disease-modifying or immunologic drugs, most focused on treating symptoms. The overall failure rate was 99.6%. There hasn’t been a new drug approved for AD since 2003 when Namenda was approved for symptomatic treatment of moderate-to-severe AD.
Despite the high level of risk associated with AD drug development, committed companies continue to pursue R&D in this space, but it’s still not enough. As of December 2016, there are 23 drugs in phase 3 development for AD and 134 active trials---a mere pittance compared with oncology in which there are close to 5,000 active drug trials in process, and more recruiting.
As Jeffrey Cummings from the Center for Brain Health at the Cleveland Clinic noted earlier this year, “Overall, the ecosystem of AD drug development must be altered to yield more targets and more candidate therapies if a robust pipeline of therapies is to be established.”
That’s where the Cures Act comes in. The AD research community stands to benefit in many ways from this eleventh-hour bipartisan feat, especially from the $1.6 billion Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative and the funding of the EUREKA prize competition to spur innovation in AD research.
Cures is being hailed as groundbreaking legislation, but for AD researchers, many of the law’s built-in initiatives reflect current best practices in Alzheimer’s R&D---large-scale data-sharing, innovative trials design and mega-collaboration. The day after Cures passed in the Senate, the AD research community convened in San Diego at CTAD to listen to a post-mortem recap from Lilly on sola, as well as more encouraging updates from companies like Biogen, which presented phase 1B data showing that adacanumab successfully reduced beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of AD patients; EIP Pharma, which highlighted positive phase 2A data on neflamapidmod in patients with mild cognitive impairment; Eisai with positive phase 1B data on its BACE inhibitor and Sangamo Biosciences, which presented positive, very early-stage data on its gene therapy.
On the last day of the conference, Anavex Life Sciences, a small company with a first-in-class small-molecule, sigma-1 receptor agonist in phase 2A development for mild-to-moderate AD, presented safety and exploratory efficacy data from a 32-patient study on ANAVEX 2-73. Phase 2A, 57-week data demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile, in addition to positive functional and behavioral outcomes. There were significant improvements in insomnia, depression and agitation, and patients reported feeling happier, being able to play golf again, enjoying international travel and even having more compassion for children.
The presentation’s high point was the cognition data. The data showed early signs of a disease-modifying effect when ANAVEX 2-73 was compared with the current standard of care, with drug-related improvements in attention, working memory, verbal learning and other cognitive domains, compared with declines in the standard-of-care population. And when treated patients were tracked based on MMSE/ADL/CogState scores, after 57 weeks, the scores hovered right around baseline, suggesting cognitive stability.
“This is the first drug to demonstrate statistically significant improvement in cognitive domains. We were able to learn from the vast data available from other AD trials,” said Christopher Missling, PhD, CEO of Anavex. “We learned from others’ failures and we were able to factor everything that we know about this disease into our development process.”
As a small company, Anavex has been able to leverage data made available through the Critical Path Institute’s Coalition Against Major Diseases (CAMD) to inform clinical trial design. CAMD facilitates sharing of precompetitive patient-level data from legacy clinical trials, and supported development of a clinical trial simulation tool for AD.
Because of collaborative culture of the AD research community, and the groundwork laid by CPI and other stakeholders, Anavex was able to successfully use adaptive clinical trial design to test their drug in 32 patients and show a statistically significant effect sufficient to justify moving into phase III.
The Cures Act is intended to create more opportunities for companies to find methods to determine early on whether a drug has what it takes to cross the finish line---and when a drug shows real potential, and meets rigorous safety standards, new drug-development tools will be available to make the pathway to approval more straightforward.
“I think the legislation is extremely important because it helps to allocate resources. Time is always lost in the interfaces between companies and the FDA. Every day counts,” said Missling.
In reality, implementation of Cures will be slow-moving. Nonetheless, the additional funding and adoption of more innovate trial design could move the target 2025 date for approval of a disease-modifying AD treatment up a year or two, possibly more.
That’s what twenty-first century victories are made of---pragmatic, collaborative and relentless research that uses new technologies and reserves of knowledge to accelerate drug development and approval.
Yesterday the Alzheimer’s Association was one of hundreds of patient/disease advocacy groups celebrating passage of the Cures Act. From the beginning, when Representatives Fred Upton and Diane DeGette introduced the bill in May 2015, the association rallied long and hard for this legislation, driven by the sense of urgency around Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—the leading cause of death from a disease that can’t be prevented or cured; the most expensive disease in the U.S. and a disease associated with a tremendous personal burden borne by patients and their families.
When Lilly canceled the solanezumab development program last month, it was disappointing, but not a complete surprise. Unlike oncology, AD drug development has been a battlefield where there have been very few victories.
Between 2000 and 2012, there were 413 AD trials, including 83 phase III trials. While some of these studies tested disease-modifying or immunologic drugs, most focused on treating symptoms. The overall failure rate was 99.6%. There hasn’t been a new drug approved for AD since 2003 when Namenda was approved for symptomatic treatment of moderate-to-severe AD.
Despite the high level of risk associated with AD drug development, committed companies continue to pursue R&D in this space, but it’s still not enough. As of December 2016, there are 23 drugs in phase 3 development for AD and 134 active trials---a mere pittance compared with oncology in which there are close to 5,000 active drug trials in process, and more recruiting.
As Jeffrey Cummings from the Center for Brain Health at the Cleveland Clinic noted earlier this year, “Overall, the ecosystem of AD drug development must be altered to yield more targets and more candidate therapies if a robust pipeline of therapies is to be established.”
That’s where the Cures Act comes in. The AD research community stands to benefit in many ways from this eleventh-hour bipartisan feat, especially from the $1.6 billion Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative and the funding of the EUREKA prize competition to spur innovation in AD research.
Cures is being hailed as groundbreaking legislation, but for AD researchers, many of the law’s built-in initiatives reflect current best practices in Alzheimer’s R&D---large-scale data-sharing, innovative trials design and mega-collaboration. The day after Cures passed in the Senate, the AD research community convened in San Diego at CTAD to listen to a post-mortem recap from Lilly on sola, as well as more encouraging updates from companies like Biogen, which presented phase 1B data showing that adacanumab successfully reduced beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of AD patients; EIP Pharma, which highlighted positive phase 2A data on neflamapidmod in patients with mild cognitive impairment; Eisai with positive phase 1B data on its BACE inhibitor and Sangamo Biosciences, which presented positive, very early-stage data on its gene therapy.
On the last day of the conference, Anavex Life Sciences, a small company with a first-in-class small-molecule, sigma-1 receptor agonist in phase 2A development for mild-to-moderate AD, presented safety and exploratory efficacy data from a 32-patient study on ANAVEX 2-73. Phase 2A, 57-week data demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile, in addition to positive functional and behavioral outcomes. There were significant improvements in insomnia, depression and agitation, and patients reported feeling happier, being able to play golf again, enjoying international travel and even having more compassion for children.
The presentation’s high point was the cognition data. The data showed early signs of a disease-modifying effect when ANAVEX 2-73 was compared with the current standard of care, with drug-related improvements in attention, working memory, verbal learning and other cognitive domains, compared with declines in the standard-of-care population. And when treated patients were tracked based on MMSE/ADL/CogState scores, after 57 weeks, the scores hovered right around baseline, suggesting cognitive stability.
“This is the first drug to demonstrate statistically significant improvement in cognitive domains. We were able to learn from the vast data available from other AD trials,” said Christopher Missling, PhD, CEO of Anavex. “We learned from others’ failures and we were able to factor everything that we know about this disease into our development process.”
As a small company, Anavex has been able to leverage data made available through the Critical Path Institute’s Coalition Against Major Diseases (CAMD) to inform clinical trial design. CAMD facilitates sharing of precompetitive patient-level data from legacy clinical trials, and supported development of a clinical trial simulation tool for AD.
Because of collaborative culture of the AD research community, and the groundwork laid by CPI and other stakeholders, Anavex was able to successfully use adaptive clinical trial design to test their drug in 32 patients and show a statistically significant effect sufficient to justify moving into phase III.
The Cures Act is intended to create more opportunities for companies to find methods to determine early on whether a drug has what it takes to cross the finish line---and when a drug shows real potential, and meets rigorous safety standards, new drug-development tools will be available to make the pathway to approval more straightforward.
“I think the legislation is extremely important because it helps to allocate resources. Time is always lost in the interfaces between companies and the FDA. Every day counts,” said Missling.
In reality, implementation of Cures will be slow-moving. Nonetheless, the additional funding and adoption of more innovate trial design could move the target 2025 date for approval of a disease-modifying AD treatment up a year or two, possibly more.
That’s what twenty-first century victories are made of---pragmatic, collaborative and relentless research that uses new technologies and reserves of knowledge to accelerate drug development and approval.
