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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. Earlier this week, yet another potential cure for Alzheimer's failed. Pfizer called off additional studies of its intravenous drug bapineuzumab, an antibody designed to seek and destroy plaques that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's.

The thinking was that if you clear the plaques, maybe the dementia will improve or go away. Unfortunately, the drug did not seem to do that. But it's not the only possibility. Researchers are testing other types of antibodies. They're testing hormones. They're trying gene therapy. What are the chances that these approaches will pan out? Might we see an Alzheimer's vaccine someday? That's what we're going to be talking about, a status check on Alzheimer's research.

Our number is 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us @scifri, and you can also go to our website at sciencefriday.com.

Dr. Ronald Petersen is director of the Mayo Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Petersen.

RONALD PETERSEN: Thanks very much, Ira.

FLATOW: First give us a little inside baseball on what happened with the Pfizer drug. Did it not clear the plaques? Do we know? Do we know why it failed?

PETERSEN: Well, it was a preliminary report regarding the clinical findings, meaning that the memory, the functional changes in these patients with the mild to moderate state of the dementia of Alzheimer's disease, the clinical features did not improve.

What we don't know yet, they haven't announced yet, is whether the drug actually had an impact on the underlying biological process. So there was no clinical improvement, but we're still waiting for data on the biological signal. Did the antibody do what it was supposed to do in the brain?

Read more from the original source:
Attacking Alzheimer's With Antibodies, Hormones

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