After covering the Alzheimer’s space through every high and low, BioSpace’s Annalee Armstrong welcomes back Roche for the 2026 Alzheimer’s Renaissance.
We all have those news moments in our lives where we remember exactly where we were. For me, I was sitting on a well-worn leather couch in a frigid Florida AirBnb—cold because the AC had been cranked to the highest setting by warring family members. It was June 2021.
Around me was pure chaos. My 15-month-old son was ripping books off the shelves; two pre-teens were running amuck and arguing. I opened my laptop hoping for a nice quiet morning before I could sneak away to the beach after deadline.
But then it happened: the FDA approved Aduhelm. It was a controversial—and expensive—Alzheimer’s disease medicine that would eventually be pulled from the market after being found ineffective. But already at the time, there were dissenting voices that were overruled to secure its greenlight. In hindsight it’s clear that the whole saga scarred Biogen’s reputation, and maybe even damaged the entire industry’s quest to find new medicines for the devastating neurodegenerative disease.
I was drawn back to this moment on that ugly couch on Tuesday when Roche announced a successful Phase I/II trial for its antibody trontinemab. After Aduhelm’s epic failure, Biogen went on with partner Eisai to eventually get Leqembi approved for Alzheimer’s. Eli Lilly followed with Kisunla.
Roche was player three in the battle for a disease-modifying Alzheimer’s drug. The company experienced dramatic highs and lows in this quest, just like everyone else in this disease space, as the unforgiving clinical environment claimed candidate after candidate. But while Lilly and Biogen surged ahead, Roche’s Genentech unit was forced to back off, recircle the wagons for what felt like the 1,000th time and start over after the definitive failure of gantenerumab in 2022.
Through it all, Roche’s scientists kept pushing, contributing to the market in other ways with a new test that has aided diagnosis so that patients can get on treatments like Leqembi and Kisunla. They never stopped working on treatment options, either, fine tuning their Brainshuttle technology to foster the movement of medicine across the blood-brain barrier.
Several years after the monoclonal antibody class entered the market for Alzheimer’s, we know it hasn’t been a perfect roll out. The diagnostic hurdles had to be figured out and doctors had to adjust to the new treatment paradigm.
I remember feeling deeply unsettled when the FDA approved Aduhelm and the years that followed that spectacular regulatory and commercial failure were riddled with turmoil for researchers and for patients. But here we are in 2025 in a much more hopeful space. Patients have options to try. They have more coming in the clinic from pharma and biotech. Several key readouts from Biogen and Lilly are expected in the months ahead.
And Roche is back. So now with three major pharmas pushing to expand in Alzheimer’s, more patients than ever will have increasingly effective options.
May 2026 be the year of the Alzheimer’s renaissance once again.
