We Need New Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease
They're essential to coming up with better treatments, and a new initiative could provide them
Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, and the only one that can’t be prevented or slowed. Unlike cancer and heart disease, we currently lack both the tools to easily diagnose Alzheimer’s and the medications to effectively treat it.
There are many reasons for this. In sharp contrast to other illnesses, and despite many efforts, huge expense and hundreds of clinical trials, no new treatments for Alzheimer's disease have been approved in the last 16 years. The emphasis has been on drugs targeting beta-amyloid proteins, which clump into plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, these approaches have not yet yielded the results we hoped for.
So now it’s time to target novel pathways to tackle this incredibly complex disease.
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