Back To Square One For Big Pharma, Following The Latest String of Alzheimer's Test Failures

Big Pharma's years-long battle to find a treatment, if not a cure, for Alzheimer's has been marked by numerous defeats.

Experts say that, if a treatment for Alzheimer's isn't developed, the disease could end up costing around $1 trillion annually by 2050 – with an estimated 13 million people in the U.S. suffering from Alzheimer's, compared to five million today.

There are dozens of early-stage Alzheimer's drugs in clinical trials right now – and most are expected to fail.

"There are 100 trials of about 80 drugs currently in the pipeline," Jeffrey Cummings, director of the a Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, recently told the FierceBiotech.com

The industry website also noted that research into late-stage Alzheimer's has yielded nearly nothing for the big pharmaceutical corporations.

“Eli Lilly's LLY solanezumab and bapineuzumab at Johnson & Johnson JNJ and Pfizer PFE both failed spectacularly in Phase III tests,” the website said said. “And while the companies continue to plug away--Lilly has a new study focused on solanezumab in earlier-stage Alzheimer's patients--the R&D arena has racked up a whopping 99.6% clinical trial failure rate, according to Cummings' review of the trial data from 2002 to 2012.”

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On Monday, meanwhile, North Carolina-based Targacept TRGT formally abandoned its clinical trial of an Alzheimer's drug in its pipeline.

“We are disappointed for Alzheimer’s disease patients and their families,” Targacept CEO Stephen Hill said in a statement.

“We designed a rigorous study to provide a definitive answer on whether TC-1734 could be a better treatment option than the current standard of care,” he added, “in what has been a very difficult disease area for the development of novel therapeutics.”

And yet, given the potential rewards for a successful Alzheimer's treatment, the research continues.

Earlier this week, Novartis NVS announced that, pending regulaory approval, it plans a study in Europe an North America starting next year, to see if two of its drugs can prevent the disease in people who have a genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's.