This kind of blood-based test will be a big deal for accelerating the adoption of newly approved Alzheimer's drugs. This reminds me of an initiative I had the privilege leading at AstraZeneca 6 years ago, while working on a potential disease-modifying Alzheimer's drug together with my Eli Lilly colleagues. The AZ/Lilly teams identified inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostic tools as a key successful factor for the wide adoption of disease-modifying drugs, because PET scans are too expensive and hard to access and lumbar puncture is invasive for patients. The team agreed that it would be very important to support the diagnostic tool development, even though neither company was in the business of developing diagnostics. Unfortunately the drug failed in Ph3, and we never got the chance to implement our plan.
Fast forward 6 years, I'm extremely happy to see huge progress has been made to develop inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostics for Alzheimer's, despite the lack of progress on the therapeutics front until recently. I expect the full approval Leqembi and the potential full approval for donanemab will accelerate the commercial adoption of these new diagnostics, which in turn will ensure faster adoption of the new drugs too.
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