What Does Pfizer Backing Out of Alzheimer Research Mean to the Field?

Hi. My name is Richard Isaacson. I am director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. I am reporting today for Medscape.

You may have heard the recent news about Pfizer. They are abandoning their entire Alzheimer disease (AD) portfolio. They are not doing any new drug discovery or investing in anything, and are going in a different direction.

There has been a lot of chatting about this and talk in coffee houses, doctor's lounges, and online about what this means for the field of AD. Does this mean that things are so bad that Pfizer is getting out? Maybe there is just no hope at all. I wanted to give a little bit of perspective, because that is not exactly the route that I go down when interpreting this.

As we all know, drug development takes years and years, and millions (sometimes billons) of dollars to go from the bench to the bedside. There have been a lot of failures. Around 90% of all Alzheimer's drugs have failed over the past couple of decades.^[1]When a drug company says that they are just not going to invest all that time and money because of the 99% likelihood of failure, I think some people would understand that.