CHICAGO: It’s incredibly difficult to bring a new pharmaceutical drug to market – about 95% of drugs in clinical trials never get approval. For Alzheimer’s disease, that percentage changes to 99%.
But Vivek Ramaswamy, a 29-year-old former Wall Street hedge fund manager, told investors at a meeting Wednesday that his company Axovant is “a single confirmatory study away” from getting FDA approval for his mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease treatment, currently called RVT-101.
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline started developing the drug, but couldn’t get it off their hands fast enough — it had done poorly on its own in clinical trials. That is, except one, which combined the drug with Aricept, a widely used drug already available on the market and used to treat Alzheimer’s symptoms like memory loss and confusion. Together, the two slowed the loss of cognition and ability to perform daily tasks than when Aricept was taken alone…