The two companies said Tuesday night their drug candidate, lecanemab,in a trial of about 1,800 patients in the early stage of the disease, and prolonged progression of the disease at 18 months by 27% compared to the placebo using a scale quantifying the severity of symptoms in six areas.
There is further testing to come. Doctors will argue whether this slowdown is clinically meaningful to patients, or whether it’s even real, as measuring the disease’s progress is difficult. What’s obvious, though, is that if it works, investors are penciling in sales assumptions that aren’t crazy.Biogen’s $11 billion gain in market capitalization implies roughly $6.
Decades of failure to find a cure explain why investors are gun-shy. A 2014 study in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy showed that 99.6% of drugs tested between 2002 and 2012 failed to help patients, and the following decade was more of the same. Even Aduhelm, a drug developed by Eisai and Biogen and approved last year, was a commercial disappointment, as the U.S. government put