Posted by Michael Wonder on 04 Mar 2020
When a drug study abruptly ends, volunteers are left to cope
3 March 2020 - A participant might commit months or years to a drug trial, only to see it vanish overnight.
On March 21, 2019, the staff at the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia was scrambling to learn more about an early-morning announcement: Two pharmaceutical companies, Biogen and Eisai, would discontinue their clinical trial of a drug intended to slow the progression of early Alzheimer’s disease.
A “futility analysis” had shown that aducanumab, being studied in more than 3,200 people worldwide, would not prove effective. It was yet another disheartening result; after decades of drug research, one medication after another — hundreds of them — had failed to prevent, arrest or cure Alzheimer’s.
