If you’ve followed any news on Alzheimer’s research for the past year, you’ve heard  of the great hope (or hype some might say) about an investigational medicine called Dimebon.  A rusty old antihistamine from Russia, Dimebon had been heralded as the next breakthrough for Alzheimer’s treatment.   Big Pharm Pfizer had stepped up to buy the rights to the drug and, along with its subsidiary company Medivation, was awaiting Phase III clinical trial results.
And the envelope please (sorry I’m watching the Oscars as I’m typing this)…
Long story short, the results were negative – Dimebon acted no better than a placebo with respect to cognitive function improvement in a large (800 patients) scale study.
You’ll find plenty of news stories reporting this downer-of-a-story; I like Dr. Scott Mendelson’s article from the Huffington Post found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-mendelson-md/alzheimers-drug-dimebon-i_b_485014.html
If you want to see the reaction by way of “statement” from the Alzheimer’s Association, it’s here: http://www.alz.org/news_and_events_in_the_news.asp
But the most poignant response, the one that’s sticking with me for now, is from a Letter to the Editor to the Alzheimer’s Daily News posted last week and penned by a Richard Taylor who writes:
Tomorrow will be tomorrow and time spent wishing today that things will get better for me tomorrow is time, my time ill spent.  And, when it is ill spent on a regular basis it causes many people to develop the symptoms of other disorders – anxiety, depressed, fearful.
The fabled pipeline of new drugs has thus far proven to be a wastebasket full of press releases and different colored pills that don’t produce the results in many that they seemed to produce in very, very few.  Dimebon hinted at and in fact claimed to have the ability to at worst slow down the progress  and at best actually reverse the changes in the brain that cause the symptoms of dementia.   Now it turns out it may be back on the shelves of drug stores in Russia as an antihistamine.