Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center helped test a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The drug, aducanumab, is the first to be approved that can slow the progression of the disease, Wexner said in a news release.
There were extensive clinical trials at Wexner and at other facilities, the news release said. The drug stops the buildup of amyloids, a protein, in the brain.
“This medicine gets rid of this toxic protein,” Dr. Douglas Scharre, a neurologist and director of the division of Cognitive Neurology at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, said in an interview on the center’s website. “The earlier you catch people that have this toxic amyloid in their brain and are not so devastated, still just have very minimal cognitive issues, we’re hoping that we can modify the disease. We get this toxin out, and hopefully this will slow down the condition so that your life is improved and you have improved ability to interact with your loved ones and just have a better quality of life.”
The drugs are safe, the physician said.
“It looks like they can potentially change the course of the disease,” he said. “Ohio State has been involved in clinical trials from early days for these disease-modifying therapies, including aducanumab, and still involved in trials. So many patients, thank you to them for participating in clinical trials. This is how we discover new innovations and treatments for people.”
