Study Suggests Alzheimer's Vaccine Safe

W A S H I N G T O N, July 11 -- Preliminary results from the first human study of a possible Alzheimer’s vaccine suggest the experimental compound is safe, San Francisco’s Elan Pharmaceuticals announced at the first World Alzheimer’s Congress today.

The experimental vaccine, known as AN-1792, garnered attention last year when the company, a subsidiary of Ireland’s Elan Corporation, discovered that the compound could ward off and even reduce Alzheimer’s signature brain-clogging amyloid plaques in mice.

“In the brains of Alzheimer’s victims we find a protein that’s widely assumed to play a major role in the cause of this disease,” ABCNEWS ’medical correspondent Dr. Timothy Johnson explained on today’s Good Morning America.

“So scientists have been able to produce a strain of mice in which they can simulate Alzheimer’s…then take some of this protein and inject it into the mice like a vaccine, stimulating the immune system.”

Mice Are Not Human “Of course, mice aren’t humans,” cautioned Elan’s lead scientist Dale Schenk.  

The company has begun small studies in people to see if the vaccine is safe. In the first safety results from those Phase 1 trials, none of the 24 Americans with early Alzheimer’s who received a vaccine injection suffered side effects, Schenk said.

“There’s no questionthe vaccine was well-tolerated,” he told the international meetingof 2,800 Alzheimer’s researchers.

Holding Our Breath

“Everybody is now holding their breath about the next stage which would be to test it for effectiveness in humans,” Johnson said.  

The company hopes to launch those effectiveness studies by the end of 2001. Elan is enrolling 80 British patients with early Alzheimer’s into another Phase 1 study and giving them three shots of the vaccine over several months. Their immune systems will be checked for early signs that the vaccine is strong enough to activate immune cells necessary to fight disease.