Companies focused on Alzheimer's R&D need to catch up on patient involvement, and earlier diagnosis may help, patient advocate suggests.

Anti-beta amyloid antibodies from Lilly, Biogen Idec and Roche took center stage at the recent Alzheimer’s Association International Congress, but as a new PhRMA analysis shows, getting to the development finish line is rare – with 30 failures for every one success.

Martin Tolar, a neurologist and neuroscientist by training and longtime AD R&D leader and dealmaker, believes that tramiprosate, a red-algae derivative that failed Phase III trials in 2007, had, in fact, significant disease-modifying benefit for a specific subset, but still a majority, of patients in the study. He founded Alzheon Inc. around a prodrug of tramiprosate and related intellectual property to pursue what he sees as a high-speed, low-cost pathway to test whether trampirosate could become the first approved AD drug in more than a decade – and the first personalized to a genetically identifiable patient population.