Which is something that big pharma is going to be very unhappy about. The holy grail they have been searching for: an alzheimer's drug that stops the disease may actually end up making pharmaceutical companies no money.

I can't post a link, so here's the entire column:

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New Alzheimer's Drug Could Be Effective, Cheap, and Unprofitable

By Alexis Madrigal July 30, 2008 | 2:51:16 PMCategories: Pharmaceutical Industry


An Alzheimer's drug that targets a new area of the brain's circuitry could be a landmark advance in the treatment of dementia, a new study suggests.

And in a surprising twist, scientists first synthesized the drug over a century ago, meaning it cannot be patented by pharmaceutical companies.

The focus of most drug research has been beta-amyloid, a protein which forms sticky clumps outside brain cells, impeding their functioning. But the new drug, Rember, works by breaking up clumps of a different protein, tau, that accumulate inside dying neurons. Tau clumps were long thought a symptom, not a cause, of Alzheimer's.

"This first modestly sized trial in humans is potentially exciting," said Clive Ballard, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society and who was not involved with the research, told The Telegraph. "It suggests the drug could be over twice as effective as any treatment that is currently available."

The company behind Rember, TauRX, presented its study at a massive research conference on dementia, The International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease, in Chicago. The results have not been published in a peer-review journal yet. But long-time researchers were still impressed with the drug.

Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, director of Alzheimer's research at the National Institute on Aging, enthused to the AP that the study showed "the first very positive results" she'd seen for stopping mental decline.

By contrast, Alzheimer's treatments targeting beta-amyloid have repeatedly disappointed researchers and biotech companies. For example, last month Myriad Genetics' highly anticipated Flurizan failed to pass its most recent clinical trial. This week, Elan-Wyeth presented worse-than-expected data on its new drug, bapineuzumab. And most currently available treatments seem to offer marginal improvements, at best.

No wonder Rember has researchers excited. It's an even more remarkable outcome for a compound that has been around since the 1800s.

According to the stellar Mind Hacks blog, Rember appears to be a compound, methylene blue, that was first synthesized back in 1876. And that turns out to have huge financial implications.

That's because, as Vaughan Bell explains, no company could patent what could be one of century's blockbuster drugs.

In other words, anyone can make the drug which means its much harder to make money on it as pricing becomes competitive. In contrast, a patent gives you a time-limited monopoly - albeit one that can earn billions.

A widely available cheap generic drug that treats a major disease is actually a fantastic thing for society, but developing them is not typical behaviour for pharmaceutical companies who tend to shun unpatentable drugs.

So Rember could turn out to be cheap and effective, which is great for everyone, except for big pharma, the industry that would probably be needed to produce massive amounts of the drug.