Current therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and clinical trials

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a major type of dementia and neurodegenerative disease, characterized by memory loss and cognitive decline. Over decades, significant efforts have been dedicated to finding its cause, pathogenic mechanisms, biomarkers for early detection, and clinical trials for its treatment. Earlier approved drugs mainly ameliorated the symptoms of AD, until recent years when two drugs targeting amyloid-beta (Aβ) protein were approved to slow down the progression of the disease. This review article encompasses the history of drug development in treating AD and clinical trials that failed and succeeded. Clinicaltrials.org website was systematically searched and screened for randomized controlled trials with results posted in the past 10 years. Among the 3,388 AD clinical trials, 211 interventional studies registered under AD have met eligibility. This review includes the interventional targets for drug discovery such as Aβ, tau, neurotransmitter receptors, neuroinflammation, multi-target studies, repurposing pharmacological agents, non-pharmacological interventions, and clinical therapy development for the neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia. Current clinical trials are ongoing and no results are available as of yet. With the vast choices of drug targets that have been investigated, this review aims to present some insights into future AD drug design and trials and contribute to our ongoing efforts to find the cure.

Keywords

• clinical trials
• alzheimer’s disease
• amyloid-beta
• tau protein
• immunotherapies
• multi-target drugs