It’s a Swiss-American team that has tested a new antibody-based treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease, a treatment that has shown ‘impressive’ results in more than 100 patients who participated in the clinical study.
At the University of Zurich, we have teamed up with the American company Biogen to test a new treatment on people with Alzheimer’s disease. This treatment was developed based on a monoclonal antibody called « Aducanumab », which attacks the amyloid plaques in a targeted manner by binding to them to better degrade them. For an entire year, 165 patients with an early stage of the disease took part in a first clinical study, which showed excellent results, since beta-amyloid peptide deposits were effectively reduced.
» The action of the antibody is impressive, and its effect depends on the dose and the duration of the therapy“, says Professor Nitsch, who leads the team of Swiss researchers, in the journal Nature. Better, in patients who received the highest dose, the plaques had practically disappeared after one year. » While in patients in the placebo group, brain abilities deteriorated significantly, they remained significantly more stable in those who were given the highest dose of the antibody.“, says Professor Nitsch.
As for side effects, small episodes of mild to moderate headaches have been seen in some patients. Also, slight abnormalities probably related to the elimination of deposits were also observed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). But for Professor Nitsch, this is a serious step forward in the fight against this neurodegenerative disease, for which early diagnosis is an essential issue, the deposits of neurotoxic plaques actually occurring more than ten years before the appearance of the first symptoms.
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