Recently, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) announced that it would axe its Alzheimer's drug atabecestat. This move is another blow to a pharmaceutical company seeking to find an effective treatment for this disease. However, many pharmaceutical companies have been failing to bring a new Alzheimer's drug to market, so this is really not a big surprise. Johnson & Johnson will be fine anyway, because its oncology unit has seen a surge in sales over the last few quarters. Despite this failure in the Alzheimer's program, it still remains a buy.
Stopping Alzheimer's Trial
Johnson & Johnson announced that it would stop the phase 2b/3 trial known as EARLY, which used the drug atabecestat (JNJ-54861911) to treat patients with Alzheimer's. This time though the program was not stopped because of efficacy. It was stopped because of severe liver toxicity. It was noted that patients treated with the drug were experiencing dangerously higher levels of liver enzymes. That means that the risk-benefit profile of this drug was highly lacking. The phase 2 long-term safety follow up study was also stopped as well. The thing is that this should not be surprising at all for two reasons. The first reason is that atabecestat belongs to a class of drugs known as BACE inhibitors. There were many BACE inhibitors in development to treat Alzheimer's, but many have fallen by the wayside.
