Dr. Daniel Skovronsky believes a big leap in Alzheimer’s disease treatment may be just around the corner–and that an overlooked class of medicines could become the GLP-1 drugs of the future.
The rapid-fire innovations from Lilly and its closest competitors have stirred controversy as well as headlines. Researchers, policymakers and industry players are debating whether the benefits of next-generation Alzheimer’s treatments can justify their considerable costs and risks–and whether Medicare and employers can cover pricey new weight-loss drugs without going broke.
“This is actually my life’s work,” Skovronsky said. Lilly is now testing its experimental therapy donanemab in patients who have the pathology of Alzheimer’s in their brains but don’t yet have symptoms of the disease. Skovronsky is hopeful the drug can prevent the onset of symptoms, he said, based on the patterns seen in late-stage trials of donanemab in people who already have symptoms. “The treatment effect was the largest in the patients who had the earliest stage of disease,” he said.
Skovronsky said that donanemab’s disease-slowing effect “is really quite significant.” Nearly half the patients treated with donanemab in a clinical trial, for example, had not lost any cognition a year later, he said. For those patients to have a full year without any decline to spend with their families, he said, is “hugely impactful.”
“I think it will have the same efficacy as some of the best injectables out there,” Skovronsky said of Lilly’s experimental weight-loss pill orforglipron. With 1 billion people globally likely to benefit from the drugs, “it’s sort of inconceivable to imagine addressing the global burden of obesity with a once-a-week injectable,” he said. “It’s not something the world’s supply chains can handle, so we’re definitely going to need pills” to fight the obesity epidemic.