Dr. Kenneth Custer
President & General Manager, Lilly Canada
Dr. Luc Boulay
Senior Director of Medical Affairs – Neuroscience, Lilly Canada
Lilly’s tenacity in Alzheimer’s disease research has led to breakthroughs in diagnostics and treatment and is helping to drive future innovations.
For 35 years, Eli Lilly has been driving scientific progress to improve the diagnostics, treatments, and outcomes for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. “It represents a long journey and a real commitment to this disease,” says Dr. Kenneth Custer, President and General Manager of Lilly Canada.
The company’s recent breakthrough in a new class of amyloid targeted therapies has just been accepted into regulatory review by Health Canada and is an example of this commitment. While not a cure, the drugs have the potential as disease-modifying therapies to help patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease prolong their function and independence.
Applying lessons learned from the past
Getting to this point hasn’t been smooth sailing. “There have been many failures of medications designed to try to modify the disease, which have challenged the amyloid cascade hypothesis,” says Dr. Luc Boulay, Senior Director of Medical Affairs – Neuroscience at Lilly Canada. “But Lilly’s tenacity, conviction in the science, and incremental improvements in our research have gotten us to where we can target new treatments in a much better way.”
One of the key lessons we’ve learned is that if you wait too long, you miss the opportunity to make a positive influence on the outcome of the patient, so there’s an urgency to bring these drugs to Canadian patients as fast as we can.
Lilly’s own innovation in diagnostic imaging played a key role. “Previously, the only way to confirm an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis was through autopsy, so we couldn’t really tell which patients in the earlier unsuccessful trials truly had Alzheimer’s disease. Some had other forms of dementia,” says Dr. Boulay. The new PET scanning techniques let researchers see both amyloid and tau proteins that aid in confirming a diagnosis. “That was a big advancement in getting us to a successful clinical trial,” says Dr. Boulay.
Lilly’s leadership team continues to focus on improving the lives of people with Alzheimer’s disease and their families. “It starts with bringing meaningful medicine to the market and working with regulators and then payer bodies to make these medicines available to Canadians,” says Dr. Custer. “One of the key lessons we’ve learned is that if you wait too long, you miss the opportunity to make a positive influence on the outcome of the patient, so there’s an urgency to bring these drugs to Canadian patients as fast as we can.”
A critical door in Alzheimer’s research is now open
Looking to the future, Lilly will focus on doing just that, not only with its Alzheimer’s disease portfolio but through its growing pipeline in other areas such as genetic medicine. “We’re also making concerted efforts to be more inclusive in our clinical trials by involving people from different cultures and ethnicities so we can get a better representative sample of how these medications work in different patient populations,” says Dr. Boulay.
Having opened a critical door, Lilly is poised to lead the way in developing therapies that will one day help to make Alzheimer’s a chronic and manageable disease.
Learn more at lilly.ca.
This article was made possible with support from Lilly Canada.
