A great leap forward in the war against Alzheimer’s disease

On 7 June shares in Biogen, a US biotechnology company, soared by 64%. America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had just approved Biogen’s Aducanumab, the first drug for Alzheimer’s disease to be admitted to the market for 18 years. The US Alzheimer’s Association noted that the “historic approval of Aducanumab ushers in an exciting new era in Alzheimer’s and dementia treatment and research”. Aducanumab, to be marketed as Aduhelm, was submitted for approval in the EU and Japan in 2020 and FDA approval makes the other regions more likely to follow suit.

A global scourge

More and more people are being diagnosed with serious neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s; people are living longer and we have become better at diagnosing them. In this article we concentrate on the main neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntingdon’s. The good news is that the FDA’s approval of Aducanumab will galvanise research in this subsector and bring forward successful treatments.

Alzheimer’s is the most serious neurodegenerative condition. There are 6.2 million people in the US with the disease and this number will rise to at least 14 million by 2050. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 50 million people worldwide are suffering from dementias (Alzheimer’s accounts for two-thirds of them), with ten million new cases being diagnosed each year. These are probably substantial underestimates because of