May 23, 2017

Today’s Top Alzheimer’s News

USA2 SPOTLIGHT

A May 22, 2017 Antidote blog post highlighted the importance of diversity in clinical research and featured a video panel with LatinosAgainstAlzheimer’s Director, Jason Resendez. According to the post, “For the Latino community, language can be a barrier for Spanish-dominant segments of the population. ‘A structural issue is that on clinicaltrials.gov, there’s not a way to search for trials in Spanish,’ said Jason Resendez, Executive Director, LatinosAgainstAlzheimer’s Coalition.” The video panel explores issues related to patient-centered drug development, community outreach and more.

MUST READS

A May 23, 2017 Scientific American article points to an emerging consensus that the most effective Alzheimer’s treatment will be combination therapy, attacking the disease on multiple fronts. Advances in understanding the progression of AD point to a number of underlying biological processes. A new joint effort, Alzheimer's Combination Therapy Opportunities (ACTO) grant initiative, will provide $2 million this year for testing approaches that simultaneously target two or more processes believed to underlie, exacerbate, or occur in AD.

A May 23, 2017 STAT article focused on changes in President Trump’s speech patterns, raising questions about possible cognitive decline. For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. Neurologists use tests of verbal fluency, and especially how it has changed over time, to assess cognitive status. According to Ben Michaelis, a New York City psychologist, “There are clearly some changes in Trump as a speaker” since the 1980’s, including a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time,” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure… In fairness to Trump, he’s 70, so some decline in his cognitive functioning over time would be expected.”

MUST LISTEN

A May 21, 2017 NPR radio segment recalls the story of Phineas Gage, who sustained serious brain injury in 1848 which destroyed much of his left frontal lobe. His personality changed dramatically as a result of the accident. His case helped establish brain science as a field and is still referenced by neuroscientists studying similar phenomena. "He was the first case where you could say fairly definitely that injury to the brain produced some kind of change in personality," said Malcolm Macmillan, an honorary professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and the author of, “An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage.”

INDUSTRY UPDATES

A May 23, 2017 Digital Journal article spotlighted United Neuroscience (UNS), a clinical stage biotechnology company developing best-in-class therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. A report published in the Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions journal from the Alzheimer’s Association showed that UB-311, its novel synthetic peptide vaccine targeting beta amyloid (Aβ) was safe and well-tolerated, with a 100% response rate and high anti-Aβ antibody titers across patients. “We believe there is a potential for this therapy to be effective in a large population of patients, and have designed our Phase 2 trial to target patients in the initial stages of AD where we expect UB-311 to have the greatest effect,” said Mei Mei Hu, Chief Executive Officer of UNS. The Phase 2 active immunotherapy trial in early-to-mild AD patients is fully enrolled and results are expected in mid-2018.