The U.S. stock price of Biogen went out in late January when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would take another three months to decide whether to approve the company’s new antibody drug, aducanumab.
Perhaps the first drug to effectively await the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the market saw the FDA’s delay as a positive sign that the world’s top drug regulatory body was approaching approval.
The development of this potentially life-changing treatment is condemned in Susumu Shimoyama’s “Conquering Alzheimer’s Disease”. The book recounts decades of struggle with patients, physicians, scientists and pharmaceutical companies that culminated in the development, by Biogen, the Swiss biopharmaceutical company of Neurimmune, and Eisai Japan, of this new drug. which ultimately provides a glimpse of hope for healing.
Alzheimer’s is a very degenerate disease, eating slowly at a person’s memories and mental abilities, leaving a shell of a body behind. It is a pain for family members and loved ones to see.
I know because I saw my mother through her recession from the time she started showing symptoms in the late 2000s. Over the past 10 years, she has become willing to cook, which was once her passion; she refused to take baths, arguing angrily “that old people don’t need it”; she even forgot if she had eaten. During this time, my family and I were constantly overwhelmed with despair and helplessness because we knew there was nothing we could do to bring it back or even reduce it. .
Today, she no longer knows us and cannot say even the simplest words. She cannot be encouraged to walk even though she is physically fit. The mother I knew and loved is long gone.
On a sad, tedious journey, the only medical treatment available to her was a drug called Aricept, developed by Eisai. This drug has only worked in the early stages of the disease when it has been proven to trigger some brain damage. Plus, we had no weapons against Alzheimer’s. This was not for lack of effort – scientists have beaten them after they succeeded.
Shimoyama ‘s new book offers renewed hope, although for me, I complained to the gods that the drug was not developed a decade ago, before my mother started showing symptoms.
Chart showing two-decade prognosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 5% to 8% of people aged 60 and over develop depression, and 60% to 70% of these cases turn out to be become an Alzheimer’s. (Excerpt from a paper by Randall J. Bateman et al. In the Aug. 30, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.)
Overcoming Alzheimer’s Disease records the development of scientists under the leadership of Hachiro Sugimoto at Eisai, whose mother also suffered from depression, Aricept and the subsequent journey of American, European and Japanese scientists to develop more effective drugs .
As many developed countries deal with aging numbers, this book is of the utmost importance to read, not only for patients and their families. The World Health Organization estimates that 5% to 8% of people aged 60 and over develop depression, and 60% to 70% of these cases turn out to be become an Alzheimer’s.
The disease lives not only in the genes, but it also allows those with type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking habits to be more vulnerable when which it begins. Considering the wide range of society that may be oppressed, Overcoming Alzheimer’s Disease result in interesting ads.
Not only does the book provide practical information, but it also offers admirable writing on a topic of global relevance, recalling Pulitzer Prize Siddhartha Mukherjee “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.“
Both books save readers complex medical terms, instead drawing them in with personal stories and drama, recounting the history of people’s struggles in healing. Shimoyama ‘s ability to spin good yarn reminded me of the writing of Michael Lewis, author of – among other things – “The Big Short” and “Moneyball.”
Shimoyama’s experience as a journalist and editor at a major magazine, and publisher of Bungeishunju’s books, may have helped with the search for this book. As a well-known non-fiction writer in Japan, Shimoyama reached out to a large number of patients, doctors, scholars, scientists, and pharmacy officials in the U.S., Japan, and Europe over nearly two years. decade for their stories. At a press conference on Jan. 27 at the Japan News Club, the author described this whole saga as a “long recap across nations, generations and professions.”
The book begins with a story about the discovery of a rare form of Alzheimer’s, known as Alzheimer’s disease, in the 1970s in a woman in her early 40s in northern Japan. Her doctor found many Alzheimer’s cases in her family tree, with studies of such families around the world, helping doctors and scientists later identify the development of pre-symptom Alzheimer’s. may appear over 20 years before the onset of the disease, as well as publications on specific genes that are strongly linked to mutations with Alzheimer’s.
Holding such stories together is a common thread when it comes to most Alzheimer’s-related research, especially overcoming the drug-related drug challenges that have come to fruition. end in the development of several hope-offering drugs, including aducanumab.
One of these scientific advances is the discovery and isolation of one of the two main hallmarks of Alzheimer’s – the best paired helical filaments that are best described as bound wood in brain cells. This process was completed in a Harvard laboratory by American scientist Dennis Selkoe, and his Japanese colleague Yasuo Ihara. This is also a story of global collaboration.
Comparison of healthy brain cells and their surroundings, with brain cells affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
Back in Japan, Ihara discovered that the twin helical filaments were made of a complex variant of a protein called tau. Meanwhile, Selkoe, who is still at Harvard, identified a specific protein that created the other main visible sign – a dark plaque that forms around brain cells. This plaque is a sticky protein called amyloid-beta. This is believed to accumulate around brain cells widely leading to Alzheimer’s.
Selkoe hired biologist and pharmacist Dale Schenk in 1987 for his new biopharmaceutical startup. Schenk, which was widely tested in sex, would later discover that amyloid-beta uptake can be reduced by antibodies generated by mammalian natural immune systems.
This finding was promising as it provided a good idea for future treatments, leading to a range of drugs developed to boost that immunity by companies such as Biogen, Eisai, Eli Lilly, and Roche, as well as immunosuppressive therapeutic specialists such as Neurimmune and AC Immune Switzerland.
The most popular drug today is aducanumab. The FDA will make a decision on the drug’s use by June.
In the epilogue to Overcoming Alzheimer’s Disease the author visits Hiroichi Tazaki, the doctor who treated the first patient found to have inherited an Alzheimer’s gene in the 1970s. After those grim decades of tackling a deadly disease without any cure, Tazaki’s message was simply: “Today there is hope,” And that is the main message of this book as well.
Even if the FDA does not approve the use of aducanumab, there is now a clearer way to proceed. Big Pharma, as well as startup pharmaceutical companies, is now developing drugs that target amyloid-beta and tau proteins. Shimoyama’s book is not just a medicine story, it is a story of world experts coming together to find a way through sorrow, a story for our ages.