Empowered Patient Podcast Lead Compound Targets Neuroinflammation Slowing Alzheimer’s Progression with Jeffrey Madden ADvantage Therapeutics
Jeffrey Madden, Co-Founder and CEO of ADvantage Therapeutics is developing therapies for neurodegenerative conditions, particularly Alzheimer's disease. Instead of pursuing the amyloid hypothesis, ADvantage is focused on neuroinflammation as the primary driver of Alzheimer's pathology. Trials for their lead compound AD04 show promising results in slowing hippocampal volume loss and stabilizing cognition.
Jeffrey explains, "The assumption that has been in play for more than 20 years is the amyloid hypothesis. And the idea behind that is if you could clear amyloid beta, this toxic protein, you could stop or even reverse Alzheimer's. The results are in. We're reading about Biogen and Lilly, the monoclonal antibodies that do a great job of clearing amyloid but only have modest slowing of cognitive decline."
"What we offer is that the pathology of Alzheimer's is just incomplete. We take a biology of aging worldview and we know the biggest causation for Alzheimer's is aging. We know a lane of aging is chronic inflammation. We also know bad things happen in the brain with neuroinflammation. We offer that at the roots of Alzheimer's is neuroinflammation, and we train the immune system to reduce neuroinflammation in the brain."
"The dogma of the amyloid hypothesis was very much focused on this toxic protein amyloid beta. More recently, this physical biomarker of the hippocampus is becoming more in vogue for very good reason. And we're at the cutting edge using the hippocampus as a biomarker. What we're doing in our confirmation study is mirroring the predecessor trial that I referenced going back to 2014. We can't think of a more rigorous downstream biomarker than the hippocampus, and others are following suit."
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