Forty four million people worldwide currently have Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. Unless a cure is developed, the prevalence is predicted to increase exponentially to 115 million over the next 30 years. The global market value of symptom-modifying treatments is an estimated $5 billion, with the value of successful disease-modifying drugs forecast to exceed $13 billion. To date, a lack of reliable and pharmacologically sensitive cognitive measures of drug efficacy has been a contributing factor to high attrition rates in Alzheimer’s drug trials and for the potential for disease-modifying effects to go undetected. The need for sensitive analytical tools in dementia research and development has never been greater. With the development of new cloud-based cognitive assessment systems, which are highly sensitive to identifying drug effects in patients, pharmaceutical companies can now confidently evaluate the cognitive safety and efficacy of new Alzheimer’s therapeutics in their development pipeline. The new Cantab Connect products from international technology company Cambridge Cognition have been developed specifically to maximize the detectable effect size of treatments for prodromal, mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease in clinical trials; thereby increasing the likelihood of effective new treatments being developed.
This week at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, scientists from Cambridge Cognition presented a series of data from multi-national research projects demonstrating the sensitivity of their new products to the presence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and pharmacological manipulation in patients with prodromal Alzheimer’s disease. Using the Cantab Connect tests, impaired performance at baseline could be distinguished between those with persistent MCI from those who no longer met the criteria 10 months later. This sensitivity to MCI has the potential to improve case-finding in clinical trials targeting prodromal Alzheimer’s disease. Repeated assessments over 8-10 months have also been studied, indicating consistent stability of scores in healthy older adults and significant declines in performance in those with MCI, which are particularly marked when the disease progresses to Alzheimer’s dementia, further supporting the use of the Cantab Connect products for measuring disease and treatment related changes in older adults. Dr Kenton Zavitz, Director of Clinical Affairs for Cambridge Cognition, believes Cantab Connect will have a significant impact on drug discovery: “The last ten years has seen growth in research of early detection of Alzheimer’s, which is essential to slowing and possibly halting progression of the disease. With the new Cantab Connect Prodromal Alzheimer’s product, the pharmaceutical industry now has a validated, sensitive and consistent measure of Alzheimer’s drug efficacy throughout the disease course. When a disease-modifying treatment comes to market, we expect that Cantab Connect will have played a role in its discovery.”
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Cambridge Cognition Ltd
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