With passage of the National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA) in January 2011 and the subsequent “National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease”, the war on Alzheimer’s has only just begun. But one key aspect is glaringly absent: specific funding commitments science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
More than 5 million Americans now suffer from Alzheimer, and that number is expected to more than double by 2050. Between 1998-2011, there were 101 unsuccessful AD drugs in development and only three approvals (none since 2003) @AndrewWLo Kenneth @KosikLab science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
"If a single drug-development program takes 13 years
from beginning to end and has a 5% probability of success, the expected waiting time for the next approved Alzheimer's disease drug is 260 years"
-@AndrewWLo, Carole Ho, Jayna Cummings, @kennethskosik
A systematic effort to identify, prioritize, and categorize preclinical pathways that culminates with lead compounds for each hypothesis category could generate a portfolio with sufficient scientific support to justify multiple simultaneous clinical trials science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
With a 5% success rate among independent trials, 100 or more shots may be needed to yield an attractive
investment; this requires $50 billion and the identification of nearly twice as many potential
therapeutic targets than we currently have for Alzheimer science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
The ideal megafund business model will be a new hybrid of a drug-royalty investment company (for late-stage assets), a biotech venture-capital fund (for early-stage
clinical assets), and a multiproject platform such as the @ncats_nih_gov@AndrewWLo#scipol science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Alzheimer's disease portfolio management must implement:
-state-of-the-art patient enrollment criteria
-expanded enrollment searches through community-based brain shops
-Internet-based screening
-a national institutional review board for AD clinical trials science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
@AndrewWLo et al believe that a collective effort among biopharma stakeholders—VC, pharma industry leaders, financial engineers, patient advocacy groups, and philanthropists—is both necessary and sufficient to successfully launch and manage an AD megafund science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Probability of approval and the launch of a neurologically active drug at the start of a phase 1 study is 9%, 15% at the start of phase 2, with the probability increasing to 50% at the start of phase 3 based on neurology 2003-2011 product phase transitions science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Parallel Discovery of Alzheimer's Therapeutics
"If a $600 million investment in year 0 produces a drug worth $12.3 billion in year 13, this represents a compound annual rate of return of ($12.3/$0.6)1/13 − 1 = 26.1% over the 13-year development period" science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Forest Laboratories reported Namenda’s net sales for the year ending on 31 March 2013 to be greater than $1.5 billion. Estimated peak sales of potential anti-amyloid biologics such as solanezumab are expected to reach major market sales of $5.5 billion science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Alzheimer's disease project with a high degree of validation
Aβ antibodies (6)
Pyro Aβ #antibodies (3)
Antibodies against soluble oligomers (3)
The fact that Alzheimer's disease therapeutics take so much longer to develop than do many other types of drugs implies that 20-year fixed patent terms are less valuable and pharma will be less motivated to invest @AndrewWLo@kennethskosik@ScienceMagazine science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Unless more scientific progress is made so that the
probability of success is higher and more shots on goal become available, the private sector seems unlikely to produce effective Alzheimer's disease-AD therapies over the next few decades @kennethskosik science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
The government can greatly accelerate the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) therapeutics in at least four ways:
i) by providing guarantees for the debt of an AD megafund;
ii) by starting the patent clock upon commercialization
rather than invention science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
The government can greatly accelerate the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) therapeutics in at least 4 ways:
iii) by increasing the duration of patent protection from 20 to 30 years for AD therapeutics that meet a sufficiently high efficacy threshold science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
For the fiscal year (FY) ending 30 September 2012 (FY12), @NIH dedicated only $503 million for Alzheimer's research, and the @BarackObama administration invested only $50 million. NIH funding for cancer research in the same year was more than $5 billion
🧵 A neonatal nurse has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill 6 more, making her the worst child serial killer in modern British history and raising urgent questions over whether her crimes could have been stopped
@joshhalliday theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/a…
Lucy Letby guilty of murdering seven babies as Angel of Death nurse at NHS hospital. She was working as a nurse at the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she was accused of murdering seven babies and trying to kill 10 others mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/b…
Nigel Scawn @scawn_nigel, medical director @theCountessNHS, walked away without answering as a journalist asked him: 'Why did hospital managers try to stop Letby from being investigated?’
Can you imagine applying biological intelligence-BI to achieve a 3 to 5-fold increase on AstraZeneca’s reported 19% success rate in the proportion of pipeline molecules that advance from preclinical investigation to completion of Phase III clinical trials? bioindustry.org/news-listing/m…
@BraincuresLTD's biological intelligence (BI) approach eliminated 59 of 72 target-compound pairs associated with Phase III clinical failures to enable 60 to 100% likelihood of clinical success rates across compounds that target 13 different protein classes bioindustry.org/news-listing/m…
While there are nearly 400 companies that apply artificial intelligence (AI) to de-risk certain parts of the drug development cycle, @BraincuresLTD are the only company actively using the notion of biological intelligence (BI) in research and development bioindustry.org/news-listing/m…
Providing critical support to early stage data-driven health science startups, @KqLabs offers a customised framework with a 16-week accelerator programme. The program also includes workshops to inspire and nurture the next generation of start-ups @TheCrick crick.ac.uk/news/2018-09-1…
Veronique Birault, Head of Translation at the Francis Crick Institute, said: “This is the start of a very exciting journey for the ten start-ups, and also a great contribution towards building the ecosystem for data-driven health in the Kings Cross area” crick.ac.uk/news/2018-10-2…
ChatGPT is essentially a large conversational model—a big neural net that’s been trained to predict the next word—and the challenges with it are similar challenges we see with the base large language models: it may make up facts @MiraMurati CTO @OpenAI#AI time.com/6252404/mira-m…
While @sama has a flair for generating headlines by alluding to science fiction horror stories with AGI villains, @miramurati characterizes consciousness as a philosophical idea, rather than a scientific one (“It’s a bit of a different vector,” she says) fastcompany.com/90855799/6-thi…
Greg Becker, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank sold $3.57 million of stock at an average price of $287.42 in a sell-off two weeks before it collapsed. CFO Daniel Beck ditched $575,000. The price plunged to just $39.49 before the FDIC seized the bank's assets dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation @FDICgov, which typically protects deposits up to $250,000, said it had taken charge of the roughly $175bn (£145bn) in deposits held at the Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest in the US @shermannatalie@JamesClayton5 bbc.co.uk/news/business-…
SVB’s condition deteriorated so quickly that it couldn’t last just 5 more hours. That’s because its depositors were withdrawing their money so fast that the bank was insolvent, & an intraday closure was unavoidable due to a classic bank run @DennisKelleher cnn.com/2023/03/11/bus…
Women in Innovation Programme was launched in 2016 by @innovateuk with the overall aim of increasing gender equality in business-led innovation. The annual competition supports and celebrates remarkable #women entrepreneurs & senior business leaders @KTNUK iuk.ktn-uk.org/programme/wome…