Cancer drug’s usefulness against Alzheimer’s disputed
Attempts to reproduce results did not use proper formulation, researchers say
A preliminary report from scientists at the biotech company Amgen Inc. questions a cancer drug’s ability to fight Alzheimer’s disease. In experiments described February 4 in F1000Research, bexarotene, a drug approved by the FDA to treat lymphoma, didn’t reduce levels of the Alzheimer’s-related amyloid-beta protein.
In the original work, described in Science in 2012 (SN: 3/10/12, p. 5), neuroscientist Gary Landreth of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and colleagues showed that bexarotene swiftly clears A-beta from the brains of mice, reducing both the sticky plaques and smaller forms of the protein that circulate in the brain. The mice also showed signs of improved learning and memory. A year after that work appeared, four reports, also in Science, disputed some of those findings.