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Home: Early-Onset Familial AD: News
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London: Europe-U.S. Regulators Mull Prevention Trial in Familial AD
This is Part 1 of a four-part series. See also Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. View PDF of entire series.

In memory of Malcolm (Butch) Noonan, Part 4 of this series.

16 November 2010. The setting looked more like a United Nations venue than your typical meeting room or conference center—speakers arranged in an inner circle, each seat equipped with individual monitors and global power adapters, proceedings monitored discreetly from behind darkened glass in the back. But international politics was not on the agenda on 8 November 2010 at the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) sparkling modern offices in London’s Canary Wharf business district. Instead, U.S. and European scientists, pharma researchers, and patient representatives spent a day with EMA regulators; officials from the agency’s transatlantic counterpart, the Food and Drug Administration, joined by video link at 6:45 a.m. Washington time, though some had been listening since 4:00 in the morning. The charge of the day was to begin a dialogue toward the shared goal of offering therapeutic treatment and prevention trials to families with autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s (for extensive background on this form of AD, see Alzforum’s Early-Onset Familial AD section). These families are excluded from participating in such trials, even though they have contributed immeasurably to the progress of Alzheimer’s disease research over the past two decades and may harbor unique scientific potential for finding better drugs for all Alzheimer’s disease.

A treatment trial designed specially for this population would be unprecedented. “The really new topic here at the EMA today is treatment of the pre-symptomatic state. This is a prospect that has never been touched in the regulatory framework. It is a very new discussion, and today is a starting point,” said Cristina Sampaio. Besides being a clinical pharmacologist at the University of Lisbon, Sampaio serves on EMA’s Scientific Advice Working Party, which was established by the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use. Sampaio co-chaired the meeting together with Bruno Flamion and Kerstin Westermark of the EMA. Russell Katz, who directs the FDA’s Division of Neurology Products, led the FDA delegation.

This gathering was timely. It came not only on the day Eli Lilly and Company announced its purchase of Avid, a biotech company known for an amyloid imaging agent that is expected to receive FDA approval soon and to enable earlier-stage trials in Alzheimer’s disease, but also the day before the New York Times featured an article by its reporter Pam Belluck on the promise of such trials in familial AD in a special “What’s Next” Science Times section featuring “hot” fields in science. (For more information on the projects mentioned in the Times article, see ARF API series, ARF DIAN series, ARF ADNI update, and ARF ADNI series).

The EMA had organized the meeting in response to outreach by scientists of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN). This collaboration of U.S.-British-Australian scientists to date has enrolled 125 of a planned 400 members of several dozen families with autosomal-dominant AD into a comprehensive six-year biomarker study of preclinical AD. From the get-go, DIAN scientists had intended to offer their study participants a treatment trial, and the London meeting represents the latest step in their effort. A prior meeting with industry representatives held on 23 March 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland, had made clear that the biopharma industry would consider making their drugs available for this novel kind of trial, but wanted to hear from regulatory agencies whether the regulators would support such trials and what kinds of trial design they would want to see. In Geneva that same week, DIAN scientists led by Randall Bateman of Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and EMA’s Sampaio, began planning a first such discussion. Initially expected to be small, the gathering grew when several dozen industry scientists requested a seat in the room. Maria Isaac of the EMA, who led the planning, told ARF that this level of industry interest is unusual, and had prompted the agency to host a larger event than originally envisioned.

Moreover, Huntington’s disease was added to the agenda because this neurogenetic degenerative condition poses similar challenges to autosomal-dominant AD. Having launched large observational studies as well as a systematic preclinical drug development effort, the HD field may soon be poised for similar kinds of trials in what Huntington’s researchers call “pre-manifest” disease. All told, some 70 people rushed through London’s pouring rain on a cold Monday morning, surrendered their dripping umbrellas at the door for instant wrapping in the agency’s smart “umbrella manager” machines, and settled in for a long day of discussion.

The upshot? Both the EMA and the FDA expressed great interest in such trials and took the same view on most of the big questions. Regulators rarely tip their hand in these exploratory conversations. Their guarded language can invite parsing and divining—a bit like the famously cryptic statements by the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Teasing aside, the FDA’s Russell Katz actually offered crisp guidance on one key question on which trialists need clarity, that is, which outcome measures the FDA would consider appropriate for a trial in pre-symptomatic participants. Because these people function normally, traditional clinical tools of showing whether the drug did the patient any good are useless. Katz said that a biomarker that has a lot of congruent evidence, even if it is not yet formally qualified as a surrogate, combined with a measure of subtle cognitive deficits, might be acceptable for such trials in ADAD. It would be preferable to have previously shown, in trials of the treatment in patients with sporadic AD, that there was a good correlation between the biomarker and a more traditional measure of cognitive function. However, even without that, the FDA would consider for review a trial that showed improvement in a relevant biomarker and in a sensitive measure of cognitive functioning in patients with inherited AD who did not have symptoms, according to Katz. Researchers took notice. “Biomarker plus a cognitive outcome—that, to me, was the clearest progress of the day,” said Stephen Salloway of Brown University Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, a DIAN investigator and member of its clinical trial committee.

In another positive note for families urgently waiting for new drugs, the regulators said that, given the limited number of study participants available for ADAD, one successful trial might suffice for approval. Typically, regulatory authorities require two such trials. But on a separate hope DIAN investigators are nursing—that the regulatory agencies would invoke an existing pathway called Accelerated Approval—Katz said the agency was not ready because it still had too few data to judge how strongly these biomarkers predict a future clinical benefit. However, to scientists parsing the oracle, the door on this option seemed ajar. “If the data from observational studies and drug studies using biomarkers continue to converge, we think this may yet become an option,” noted Bateman. DIAN scientists would prefer this pathway, because it gets drugs to patients faster. It enables a drug to receive the agency’s conditional blessing based on positive biomarker results, and allows the sponsor to demonstrate that the drug is clinically useful during subsequent Phase 4 observation. If those data come, the drug receives a full stamp of approval; if they do not, the agency withdraws approval.

Scientists asked regulators whether ADAD could be designated an orphan disease, as is HD. This disease category affords financial advantages to drug developers, and ADAD is rare enough to qualify. However, discussion with the EMA and FDA made clear that in order to receive this status, a drug would have to be presented as being specific to the orphan condition, and what the DIAN investigators really want is to develop drugs in ADAD as a steppingstone toward preventing all AD—late-onset and sporadic. Salloway said that, to DIAN investigators, orphan designation makes less sense than an alternative option Katz laid out, namely that of developing and approving a drug for ADAD as a specific subset of all AD. Baltazar Gomez Mancilla from Novartis Biomedical Research Institute agreed, saying: “Orphan indication is a secondary aspect.” (For more on these issues, see Part 3 of this series.)

A sticky issue in designing preclinical trials is how to handle placebo controls, and it proved contentious at the EMA meeting, as well. Some volunteers resent undergoing a study’s procedures without the hoped-for benefits of a drug. In both ADAD and HD, some say they would consider learning their genetic status if they could join a trial, but not if they end up on placebo. The Alzheimer’s scientists in London unanimously said their trials would use placebo controls to ensure scientific rigor, and offer drug to all participants after the blinded phase is over. To these scientists, the burning questions at this stage lie more in the specifics of whether they can design a trial that does not require participants to learn their genetic status, yet that does not accidentally reveal people’s status to them by dint of a drug’s known side effects. Detailed design questions such as these are where the DIAN scientists will focus their efforts next.

In contrast, the Huntington’s scientists were split between some who favored placebo controls and others who vehemently opposed their use. “Patients will never go for it; physicians will never go for it,” said Sir Michael Rawlins, who chairs England’s National Institute of Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE). Rawlins recommended the use of historical controls, whose past success he cited for the development of such drugs as penicillin, sulfonamides, and others. Likewise, Nancy Wexler, Columbia University, New York, who co-discovered the mutation that causes HD and has promoted research and awareness for the disease throughout her career, cautioned that patients might not comply with randomization. Both EMA and FDA representatives insisted on placebo, however. Without this built-in control, they said, trials would become uninterpretable and unable to support regulatory approval. “If you do a study, then it has to be one that is interpretable. If you do a study that you consider ethical but is not interpretable, that is not acceptable,” said Katz. Other HD scientists agreed with this stance.

Debate grew heated for a while but, in the end, generated a mutual understanding whereby a trial might forgo placebo controls for a drug that already had proven effective in manifest HD. In this scenario, trials in pre-manifest could conceivably proceed against historical controls. This is a more classical situation, and quite different from the new paradigm that had drawn the audience that day: that of testing unapproved candidate drugs in preclinical disease, Sampaio said. She noted that trials against historical controls only work when the drug’s effect size is large, and cautioned that neither HD nor AD research have to date produced a drug with a large effect size in clinically established disease. For the new paradigm of testing a drug preclinically that has not proven effective in clinical disease, placebo controls will be indispensible, the scientists and regulators finally agreed.

This discussion highlighted a difference between the HD and AD research fields. While the former operates from an assumption that drugs will help along the continuum of disease from preclinical to overt, AD researchers increasingly interpret a string of negative trials in mild to moderate AD to mean that drugs may well help at the preclinical stage but not once disease is apparent. “In AD, there is a concern that drugs given later do not work. There is a concern that promising therapies are failing in trials because they were too little too late. The disease appears to have a self-propagating, self-fueling, autocatalytic process, with inflammation and functional disconnection,” said Nick Fox of University College London. At least for anti-amyloid drugs, the best chance may lie in dousing the flames early. “It is increasingly clear that there is a very long pre-symptomatic period. What has moved us forward in our effort for trials now is the recognition from biomarker and imaging studies that we can see this period, characterize it, and stage it. It is our window of opportunity,” Fox said.—Gabrielle Strobel.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series. See also Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. View PDF of entire series.

 
Comments on Related News
  Related News: As ADNI Turns Four, $64 Million Data Start Rolling In

Comment by:  alessio dalla libera
Submitted 25 October 2008  |  Permalink Posted 29 October 2008

Very interesting. I suggest PET versus SPET studies.

View all comments by alessio dalla libera

  Related News: Phoenix: Making Trials Work for Patient, Sponsor, Regulator

Comment by:  Lon Schneider, ARF Advisor (Disclosure)
Submitted 3 March 2010  |  Permalink Posted 3 March 2010

Suppose you have a registry or cohort of volunteers on whom you are gathering longitudinal data and can hence characterize their recent past history, and suppose you do so with ratings that are used in prevention trials. Then you have a cohort that you can rapidly recruit from because you know them and they know you. They are following you on Twitter and Facebook. That’s what I mean by recruitment in a nanosecond. Then, because you know their pre-randomization “trajectories” or characteristics, you could better estimate how long a trial might be (taking into consideration how you expect the drug to work), then randomize them into an appropriate strata, and you can customize each individual’s outcome.

View all comments by Lon Schneider

  Related News: DIAN Dispatch from Hawaii: Glimpse at Data, Push for Trials

Comment by:  Vincent Marchesi, ARF Advisor
Submitted 20 July 2010  |  Permalink Posted 23 July 2010

One can only applaud the courage and commitment of the investigators involved in this study. It is surely a wise move to follow people with dominant mutations who are clearly at risk for clinical AD, and the markers to be studied are probably the best available.

But I'd still like to ask two questions: How sure are we that the accumulation of amyloid seen by scanning and the CSF levels of Aβ and tau that are being measured do indeed reflect the earliest pathogenic mechanisms that lead to symptomatic AD?

Secondly, is this the best time to couple this study with a battery of untested experimental therapies? No one is more aware than I of the desperate need for effective treatments, and the pressure on the investigators to add them to the study must surely be suffocating. My concerns are these: Although the evidence linking amyloid Aβ to AD is overwhelming, we still don’t know how or when it becomes toxic, and, equally important, whether other factors, such as inflammation, oxidative damage, and vascular injury are just as critical to the development of clinical disease....  Read more


  Related News: Noisy Response Greets Revised Diagnostic Criteria for AD

Comment by:  Allen Frances
Submitted 4 August 2010  |  Permalink Posted 4 August 2010

New Guidelines for Diagnosing Alzheimer's—Wishful Thinking, Dangerous Consequences
Previously, I have been quite critical of the DSM-V suggestion to introduce a new diagnosis—Minor Neurocognitive Disorder—on the grounds that it would create a large false-positive problem and would lead to unnecessary worry and cost with no useful intervention. Even more ambitious and dangerous are the recently suggested diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer's created by a panel jointly sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association. The proposal is a clear case of narrowly focused experts getting far ahead of the available technology to suggest what will be an enormously costly public health experiment with dire unintended consequences.

The goal of the proposed guidelines is laudable—to identify those at risk for Alzheimer's even before they have developed clinical symptoms and to intervene preventively before the damage is done. The suggested guidelines would divide Alzheimer's into three groups of ascending severity and clarity of presentation: 1)...  Read more


  Related News: Noisy Response Greets Revised Diagnostic Criteria for AD

Comment by:  Allen Frances
Submitted 13 August 2010  |  Permalink Posted 13 August 2010

Alzheimer's Tests: A Research Tool Not Ready for Clinical Use
In July, panels sponsored jointly by the National Institute of Aging and the Alzheimer's Association presented controversial proposed guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer's at three different stages of its progression: 1) preclinical, 2) mild cognitive impairment, and, 3) classic dementia. The preclinical panel stated that laboratory testing (i.e., PET or MRI scans, spinal taps, or blood tests) before the appearance of symptoms was meant to be purely for research. But the other two panels seemed to suggest that laboratory testing was ready, or soon would be ready, to be used in routine clinical practice in diagnosing mild cognitive impairment or dementia. Faced with widespread skepticism, the panels held a conference call to clarify their position. As reported by Gina Kolata in The New York Times, there is reassuring new information. The panels recognize that laboratory testing is still only a research tool and will not be recommending that it be included as part of current clinical diagnosis. This makes...  Read more

  Related News: London: What Regulators Say About Trials in Familial AD

Comment by:  René Spiegel
Submitted 9 December 2010  |  Permalink Posted 9 December 2010

Placebo or Historical Controls: Mathematical Model Offers a Better Choice
I read this informative series about the expert conference organized by EMA with interest. Among the issues discussed, this meeting touched on the question of whether studies with potential therapeutic agents in carriers of autosomal-dominant AD mutations could serve as a model for simplified clinical testing of new medications against pre-symptomatic stages of the more common sporadic forms of AD. My comment pertains to Part 3 of this series, which addresses the topic of placebo-controlled studies as part of clinical trials of new medications. I notice that this discussion, which comprised primarily questions by participants and answers by regulators, failed to distinguish between early and late clinical development phases of new medications. However, this differentiation is essential, because Phases 1, 2, and 3 of clinical development tackle different questions based on quite different knowledge bases about the therapy at hand.

My colleagues and I take the view that long-term use of placebo...  Read more


  Related News: Colombians Come to Fore in Alzheimer’s Research, Mass Media

Comment by:  Dina Grutzendler
Submitted 11 March 2011  |  Permalink Posted 13 March 2011

I am Colombian, and have family near the town of Yarumal. I think even if the treatment fails, many new things will be discovered, so it is worthwhile.

I think Alzheimer’s due to old age is different from the early-onset autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s disease in Yarumal. There is the possibility that the treatment works, at least partially, but that it won’t necessarily be effective for old age Alzheimer’s, considering that a lot is still unknown about the process of the illness. Still, partial success would be a lot for the people with ADAD.

View all comments by Dina Grutzendler


  Related News: Barcelona: Allosteric γ Modulation Moves Toward Clinic

Comment by:  Sascha Weggen
Submitted 5 April 2011  |  Permalink Posted 5 April 2011

Comment by Sascha Weggen and Stefanie Hahn
To understand how presenilin mutations affect γ-secretase modulators (GSMs), it's worth elaborating on the differences in the studies by Hahn et al. (Hahn et al., 2011) and Kretner et al. (Kretner et al., 2011). Both studies used similar compounds. Both used E-2012 as an example of a potent non-acidic GSM without a carboxylic acid group. In addition, Kretner et al. used GSM-1 as a potent acidic GSM, whereas we used BB25, which is a close analogue of GSM-1 with similar potency. Kretner et al. concluded from their results that the attenuating effects of most presenilin mutations could be overcome by second-generation GSMs. In contrast, Hahn et al. concluded the opposite: that the efficacy of second-generation GSMs is reduced by presenilin mutations, in a similar fashion to what was previously reported by both of our groups for the less potent NSAID-type GSMs such as sulindac sulfide (Czirr et...  Read more

  Related News: News Flash: Colombian Families Come to Phoenix for Amyloid PET

Comment by:  Jessica Langbaum, Eric M. Reiman, ARF Advisor, Pierre Tariot (Disclosure)
Submitted 5 October 2011  |  Permalink Posted 5 October 2011

We are so grateful for the interest of the New York Times in the efforts of the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative. Their coverage also means a great deal to Dr. Francisco Lopera, the pioneer who has identified the families afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Colombia, to Dr. Ken Kosik, who has supported this project throughout, to the families themselves, and to Dr. Adam Fleisher, who is directing the specific imaging project that was covered. At the end of the last trip to Phoenix, William, who was identified in the Times article as having symptomatic Alzheimer’s, stood at our farewell dinner, gestured to the people assembled, and said, “This proves that nothing is impossible.”

We hope to clarify that it is not certain that any of the experimental treatments that we are considering will fail in symptomatic patients. We hope they won't and will look at any available data carefully. The overriding point is that, regardless of which agents are selected, there is a strong and testable scientific rationale to assume that some of them may have a more profound effect when...  Read more


  Related News: From Australia, Impulse for a New Alzheimer’s Research Agenda

Comment by:  Mark E. Obrenovich
Submitted 10 October 2011  |  Permalink Posted 12 October 2011

To the authors: I agree with the visionary 25-scientist gathering in Australia. I look forward with anticipation as they reveal their discourse and suggestions. As we have stated nearly two decades or more ago, the current amyloid- and tau-centric bent is not where most of our resources should be placed. While senile plaques, depositions, and inclusions are not an ideal situation to say the least, chasing these end-stage lesions is like beating a dead horse. We need to extend our efforts to include processes that begin in the vulnerable neurons of the AD and PD patient decades before tell-tale signs of the pathobiology manifest themselves, such as in the hallmark lesions.

References:
Obrenovich ME, Morales LA, Cobb CJ, Shenk JC, Méndez GM, Fischbach K, Smith MA, Qasimov EK, Perry G, Aliev G. Insights into cerebrovascular complications and Alzheimer disease through the selective loss of GRK2 regulation. J Cell Mol Med. 2009 May;13(5):853-65. Abstract

Aliev G, Obrenovich ME, Reddy VP, Shenk JC, Moreira PI, Nunomura A, Zhu X, Smith MA, Perry G. Antioxidant therapy in Alzheimer's disease: theory and practice. Mini Rev Med Chem. 2008 Nov;8(13):1395-406. Abstract

Aliev G, Palacios HH, Lipsitt AE, Fischbach K, Lamb BT, Obrenovich ME, Morales L, Gasimov E, Bragin V. Nitric oxide as an initiator of brain lesions during the development of Alzheimer disease. Neurotox Res. 2009 Oct;16(3):293-305. Abstract

Webber KM, Casadesus G, Zhu X, Obrenovich ME, Atwood CS, Perry G, Bowen RL, Smith MA. The cell cycle and hormonal fluxes in Alzheimer disease: a novel therapeutic target. Curr Pharm Des. 2006;12(6):691-7. Review. Abstract

Obrenovich ME and Monnier VM, Glycation predisposes to amyloid formation Glycation offers new clues into the etiology of “conformational” diseases Science's SAGE KE (2004) pe2.

Atwood CS, Obrenovich ME, Liu T, Chan H, Perry G, Smith MA, Martins RN. Amyloid-beta: a chameleon walking in two worlds: a review of the trophic and toxic properties of amyloid-beta. Brain Res Brain Res Rev. 2003 Sep;43(1):1-16. Review. Abstract

Obrenovich, M. E.; Raina, A. K.; Ogawa, O.; Atwood, C. S.; Smith, M. A. Alzheimer Disease – A New Beginning, Or A Final Exit?, Cell-Cycle Mechanisms in Neuronal Death Nicoletti, Ferdinando, Agata Copani Landis Biosciences. 2003. Vol. 19(6): 71-90.

Reddy VP, Obrenovich ME, Atwood CS, Perry G, Smith MA. Involvement of Maillard reactions in Alzheimer disease. Neurotox Res. 2002 May;4(3):191-209. Abstract

Obrenovich ME, Joseph JA, Atwood CS, Perry G, Smith MA. Amyloid-beta: a (life) preserver for the brain. Neurobiol Aging. 2002 Nov-Dec;23(6):1097-9. Abstract

View all comments by Mark E. Obrenovich


  Related News: DIAN Forms Pharma Consortium, Submits Treatment Trial Grant

Comment by:  Luis Salguero
Submitted 26 December 2011  |  Permalink Posted 4 January 2012

This looks like an excellent trial. How can Latin America participate?

View all comments by Luis Salguero
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