Pfizer and Eli Lilly back Avid Radiopharmaceutical’s progress with a radioactive tracer used for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (recently reviewed here.) Since the Alzheimer’s Association’s conference in Hawaii, everyone’s been talking about the company’s success with a new study that showed promising results for Alzheimer’s disease detection. Like Bioasis, Avid is developing new ways to detect the causes and facilitate the treatment of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Avid’s study revealed brain tissues affected by Alzheimer’s under a PET scan
The ICAD (International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease) 2010 conference organized by the Alzheimer’s Association has been in the limelight this week on the blogosphere and news sources. Avid grabbed a lot of attention at the conference when it showed positive results of a radioactive tracer called AV-45 (a flouride-18 based compound). The compound is able to bind with brain tissues that underwent degeneration; and because of its radioactive property is able to illuminate these tissues under a PET scan.
The compound was tested in human brains obtained from autopsies of Alzheimer’s patients. This was part of a 5-year, $60 million initiative by the National Institute on Aging’s Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging , and the study showed that the tracer was able to “light-up” the locations in the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Some scientists suggest that the compound seems to bind with fibular forms of beta-amyloid in the brain tissue – although there are other tissues affected by the disease the ability to localize it is a very important capability.
A small, but significant step towards a cure for Alzheimer’s
There are certain aspects of Avid’s approach that make this compound lucrative. First, these results have been taken in the human brain – thereby reducing any chances of failure that come from the change of disease models – i.e. say from mouse brains to human brains. Moving from one model to another has not been very successful in the past, especially for neurological diseases. Secondly, it targets the main problem that we are facing today – treating a disease we don’t understand. Their approach seeks to reveal the underlying causes and progression trends of the disease.
Avid is being supported by Pfizer and Eli Lilly in this effort. Both companies are expecting the market for such a marker/tracer to be between $1B and $5B, however this might be limited only to the direct benefits i.e. the benefits of revealing the extent and localization of the disease. The market can be extrapolated to include benefits of treatment and that would be much larger than the estimate. Companies like Avid would possibly define the new trend shaping Alzheimer’s research today – the trend of uncovering its secrets and giving all of us a way to cure patients proactively.
