Turning Lemons into Lemonade

Successful treatments for Alzheimer's disease have eluded the pharmaceutical industry — every large drug company has had at least one failure, and many small companies have gone out of business trying to find a cure for the tricky mental ailment, In the Pipeline's Derek Lowe says. But there could be a way to get some good out of all those failures. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Coalition Against Major Diseases is developing an open-access database for results from failed Alzheimer's clinical trials. Lowe says Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Sanofi Aventis, and AstraZeneca have already pitched in with data from 11 trials altogether. Lowe says he hopes Eli Lilly, Merck (and Schering-Plough), and Pfizer all pitch in as well. "It'll be difficult to comb through all this to extract something useful, of course. But without sharing the data on these compounds, it would be utterly impossible for anything to come out of their failures," he adds. "I think this is an excellent idea, and well worth extended to other therapeutic areas."