Patients and their families may reasonably be disheartened. After 20 years of promising research and five of much less promising trials, the drug giant Pfizer has pulled out of Alzheimer’s drug development. The company has, this week, stopped Parkinson’s research as well. Both decisions were part of a move to “reallocate funding to those areas where we have strong scientific leadership”.
Translation: for the time being, we give up. Coming from the world’s biggest research-led pharmaceutical company this might seem a counsel of despair for anyone living with the long, inexorable loss that is dementia. That is not, however, the right inference to draw.
On a commercial level this has been a salutary reminder that, at a development cost of roughly £2 billion a drug,