Antibody Treatment Halts Alzheimer’s Disease for Three Years

For the first time the researchers have come up with a treatment that will help stabilize Alzheimer's disease for as much as three years, although a small study but sounds promising enough. The study claims that the drug used for immune disorders may offer long term benefits to Alzheimer's patients.

The study was released Tuesday at the U.S. based Alzheimer's Association conference in Vancouver in which the researchers reported that there is a reason to be hopeful with the limited results that have been emerged so far from a therapy that uses pooled antibodies injected into patients.

"The objective was to either improve the functioning or slow the progression of decline," said Dr. Ralph Nixon, chair of the medical and scientific advisory council for the Alzheimer's Association. "The treatment in this case was IVIG, which is a mixture of antibodies collected from the blood of healthy human individuals."

IVIG since 2004 had shown early promise for Alzheimer's which affects some of the five million Americas.

In this new study, the four patients who suffered from a mild to moderate form of the disease and who had been taking IVIG drug for three years had noticed some stability in their behaviour and in their cognitive ability.

These findings were presented by Norman Relkin, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. These findings are remarkable as there were no therapy available till date that has stopped deterioration caused by the drug.

In addition, researchers had given updates on the three trials that tested whether immune therapy could prevent the disease. Those trials will be done on participants who have no symptoms yet. Recent research done at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., published July 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows the disease starts changing the brain 25 years before someone shows symptoms.

According to Relkin, "The Gammagard therapy appears to work in two ways. One neutralizes the potential damage of amyloid plaques and appears to halt the damage inflammation can cause. But if their symptoms progressed too far it cannot work much of magic.
The starting point for the three other trials is when people are presymptomatic. The participants in these three trials are most likely to develop the disease due to a genetic mutation. Those three trials are: the A4 Trial: Anti-Amyloid Treatment of Asymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (Harvard Medical School and Brigham andWomen's Hospital in Boston); the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network - Therapeutic Trials Unit (the Washington University School of Medicine); and the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative (Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix).

Harvard University's Dr. Reisa Sperling, who is the principal investigator of the A4 trial, said it represents a paradigm shift in the research field, from treatment to prevention.

Another trial, called the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative (API) will conduct studies on amyloid-modifying treatments in cognitively normal people who are at high risk of the disease because of age and genetic background. The drug that will be used in this study is a monoclonal antibody drug called crenezumab, produced by a company called Genentech, and will be used on about 300 people, mostly from Medellin, Colombia, who have Alzheimer's-causing genetic mutations, but do not display any initial symptoms. 

Dr. Eric Reiman, the co-leader of the trial, said participants are all members of an extended family carrying a rare mutation predisposing them to early-onset Alzheimer's.

"This group offers a unique opportunity because of its size, shared genetic background and commitment to the fight against Alzheimer's," he said, adding that individuals at the highest risk of developing the disease should be given front row access to experimental drugs.

The study was funded in part by Baxter BioScience, which manufactures Gammagard, the intravenous immunoglobulin used in the study.