Dr Jan Lundberg, Executive Vice President for Global Discovery at AstraZeneca meets with Dr Eric Reiman. Executive Director at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute.
Every seventy-one seconds someone develops Alzheimer’s Disease1.
AstraZeneca is committed to bringing new medicines to Alzheimer’s disease patients and making early diagnosis a reality. To this aim, and benefiting from close collaborations with world-class experts at the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden and the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute (BAI) in the USA, AstraZeneca is proud to announce that the US investigational new drug (IND) application submitted for its AZD2184 biomarker is now in effect.
One goal of current drug development for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is the reduction or elimination of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain, a hallmark of the disease. At present, amyloid detection is carried out post-mortem to accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.
The AZD2184 biomarker is a positron emission tomography (PET) radioligand that binds selectively to amyloid and allows the plaque to be measured in real time using a PET scan. This innovative technology may offer a promising approach for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in patients, and assessment of both the severity of Alzheimer’s disease and the effectiveness of new drugs that aim to reduce amyloid plaques.
Dr Eric Reiman, Executive Director at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute comments, “Preliminary studies from Sweden suggest that the AZD2184 radioligand binds more specifically to fibrillar amyloid, raising the possibility that it will provide a more sensitive and specific index of amyloid pathology. If so, it may have the potential to improve the power to detect, track and diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and to evaluate promising amyloid-modifying treatments, many of which are beginning to be studied in clinical trials, not only after but before the onset of symptoms.”
More information:
1 http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_facts_figures.asp (referenced 24 April, 2009)
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