Eli Lilly and Biogen could not immediately be reached for comment.
These drugs have also divided regulators.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved lecanemab last year and donanemab this year. Last month, however, the European Medicines Agency opposed a license for Leqembi — the brand name for lecanemab — arguing that the small benefits of the drug on delaying cognitive decline did not outweigh the risk of serious side effects.
The U.K.’s drugs regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), is still assessing lecanemab with a decision expected imminently.
“If these drugs are approved by regulators in the UK and Europe, and become available, it is understandable that some people with early Alzheimer’s will still want to try these drugs, given their despair living with this dreadful disease,” said co-author Edo Richard, a professor of neurology at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “But there is a lot of hyperbole around the reporting of these drugs, and significant effort will be needed to provide balanced information to patients to enable informed decisions,” Richard said.
“Few in the research community ever believed that the recent amyloid-targeting medicines would be the ultimate solution to Alzheimer’s disease,” Mark Dallas, associate professor in cellular neuroscience at the University of Reading, U.K., said. The Cambridge study highlights the limitations of these therapies and underscores the “urgent need for alternative strategies to improve the lives of those living with dementia,” he added.
But others stress that the drugs still play a significant role in the fight to find a treatment for Alzheimer’s.
“We do not yet know whether longer-term treatment will continue to cause treated and placebo curves to diverge … but we now have disease modifying therapy and it would be unfortunate if those in the UK who would benefit from this therapy had to fly to the US to receive it,” John Hardy, professor of neuroscience and group leader at the U.K. Dementia Research Institute at University College London (UCL), said.
