No closer to Alzheimer’s cure despite rise in research
pharmafile | October 21, 2013 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Alzheimer’s, depression, markram
A scientist charged with developing a digital model of the human brain has said that patients with neurological and neurodegenerative conditions are not benefiting from new research.
Professor Henry Markram who is the director of a £1 billion European project to model the brain in a so-called supercomputer, said that despite a large rise in the number of studies published – people with Alzheimer’s, depression, and autism were not benefiting from the research.
“Last year there were over 100,000 peer-reviewed papers on the brain,” he said. “At some point in time you have to take a step back and ask, ‘is it working?’ and ‘do we understand the brain better?’”
“The most shocking thing is that we are getting worse at finding cures. The number of drugs for brain disease is dropping to zero.”
Compared with the 100,000 studies published, only five new drugs were approved by the FDA last year, with a similar figure for Europe.
Prof Markram put the inertia in progress down to the ‘reductionist’ approach taken by many scientists in which they go ‘deeper and deeper’ into their own small area of expertise, but at the expense of sharing data and collaborating.
He argues the better way forward is to understand just how the brain works i.e., by using data from his Human Brain Project, which is aiming to ‘reverse engineer’ the brain by simulating its biological connections computationally. He believes this has the potential to reverse the current inertia in the research of neurological disorders.
But he admitted that there was an inherent challenge in conducting trials for slow, chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s in which it could be several years before it was clear whether a drug was effective.
Speaking to the Sunday Times Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London and a GlaxoSmithKline project leader, said: “It’s true that a lot of that exponential growth hasn’t really helped with the drug problem. We still don’t have a clue about molecular changes and the way the brain is put together. With Alzheimer’s there have been hardly any new drugs.”
Prof Markram said that effective treatments for mental illness would become increasingly important due to projected increases in global population that could make the world a more stressful environment.
“If we don’t have a plan for mental health, I’d not be very confident about how society is going to cope,” he said.
Ben Adams
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