June 19, 2013
Today's Top Alzheimer's News
Promising Alzheimer's drug, NIH announces awards to provide second chance to drugs abandoned by pharma, and Alzheimer's bankrupting Medicare (read more).
Must reads
- A June 18, 2013 UTSandiego.com article reported that researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have developed a potential Alzheimer's drug that restores synapses destroyed by Alzheimer's. According to the article, "The compound is ready for human clinical trials, said Stuart A. Lipton, the Sanford-Burnham researcher leading the study. Instead of focusing on the amyloid beta pathway, which has resulted in repeated flops in drug development, the compound, called NitroMemantine, works on a downstream target."
- A June 18, 2012 Forbes.com article reported that "the National Institutes of Health awarded $12.7 million to nine academic groups to test potential medicines for diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and schizophrenia that drug companies had abandoned because they were viewed as too risky or not lucrative enough." Read the NIH announcement here.
Alzheimer's and Medicare
- A June 18, 2013 WCVB.com (MA) article highlighted Alzheimer's impact on Medicare. According to the article, "Those astronomical numbers are heading to the stratosphere in just a few short decades. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's disease. But every 68 seconds, another person develops it. By 2050, an estimated 15 million Americans will have the disease. The cost of their care is expected to rise to $1.2 trillion and includes a 500 percent increase in combined Medicare-Medicaid spending." Dr. Robert Stern, director of the clinical core of the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Center, stated, "It’s a huge, huge burden on Medicare…Perhaps, the biggest thing that's causing Medicare to go bust is the huge amount of money that it takes to take care of people with Alzheimer's disease."
International
- A June 18, 2013 Times Higher Education (UK) article reported on the impact of the UK's spending freeze on medical research. According to the article, "An online and voluntary survey of 868 researchers by the grassroots group Science is Vital found that the majority reported a fall in the number of grants funded and a decrease in the overall funding within grants since 2010. They also reported difficulty in recruiting staff and PhD students and in obtaining the necessary equipment or consumables to perform research to modern standards."