Dr. Jeffrey Cummings (Brain Health) recently published an article outlining a novel method for determining whether Alzheimer’s drug treatments in clinical trials are ready to move on to the next phase. The paper, “Translational Scoring of Candidate Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease: A Systematic Approach,” was published in The Journal of Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorder. 

With an estimated 99 percent of drugs in the development pipeline failing, Cummings outlines a semi-qualitative scoring method designed to help identify deficiencies with the goal of decreasing the failure rate and helping bring new therapies to Alzheimer’s patients. His analysis shows that each drug can be analyzed in five critical areas and scored on a scale of 1-5 for a maximum of 25. A drug with a score closer to 25 would be ready for the next phase. Currently, drugs that are moved ahead despite a low score are at a high risk for failure.