Emer MacSweeney, co-founder of Re:Cognition Health, says that we are only a few years away from being able to treat neurodegenerative diseases the same way we do with diabetes.
Although the World Health Organization labelled Alzheimer’s a ‘pandemic’ in 2018 and while it remains the seventh leading cause of death and one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people globally, it remains underserved by medical research.
As Laurence Geller, Britain’s largest philanthropic supporter of dementia care research, told Healthcare Today recently, the level of investment in dementia research is “startlingly low”. Just 20-25% of the funding that goes into cancer research is allocated to dementia.
But Emer MacSweeney, co-founder of Re:Cognition Health and a specialist in progressive neurodegenerative and neuro-developmental conditions and traumatic brain injury, believes that we are close to being able to treat these diseases like diabetes.
In an interview to be published by Healthcare Today later this week, she says that we are “only a few years – just a few years – before we reach a turning point”.
Disease-modifying treatments
What is different is the new generations of Alzheimer’s drugs that are disease-modifying treatments, meaning they address the underlying disease process. Current medicines, as she explains, “only manage symptoms without altering the course of the disease”.
Although the first generation of these drugs has hit the market and has been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, in March, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) rejected the two treatments for Alzheimer’s disease – one from Biogen, the other from Eli Lilly – twice.
Although they have been approved in the US, Europe and Japan, NICE said that medicines were “not currently cost-effective” and said that they should not be provided on the NHS at this time.
But MacSweeney says prices will come down as more drugs that target the disease come to market. There is “huge research and development in this space,” she says, and the use of biomarkers to make early diagnosis means that new treatments could “delay the onset of symptoms for years”.
