The Tempo of Alzheimer’s

• Aging
• Alzheimer's
• biotech
• BioViva
• Curing Alzheimer's
• Telocyte

Hardly a day goes by, and never an entire week, without my seeing yet another article, often a cover article, that suggests we will soon cure Alzheimer’s disease. If articles were anything to go by, then the increasing tempo of those articles, to say nothing of the increases in both research and funding, would suggest we will soon solve the problem. But, publicity, laboratories, and money are not the same as actual clinical results. In fact, the issue is never the amount of resources, but where you aim those resources. If we wish to cure Alzheimer’s, then we need to put some honest intellectual effort into understanding Alzheimer’s. Until then, publicity, laboratories, and funding are only a reflection of wishful thinking. No one ever cured a disease by injecting money into the patient, let alone making them swallow a laboratory, or listen to publicity.

Yet oddly enough, publicity is often perceived as a goal in itself. I see biotech companies who strive to get themselves mentioned on the news, as though that would create success. But whether are on the cover of Time magazine or mentioned in this week’s edition of The Scientist, news stories are never equivalent to a cure for Alzheimer’s or anything else. In fact, I suspect there is often an inverse correlation: the more your drug or your biotech company is mentioned in the media, the less likely it is to get through FDA trials, let alone improve patient care. Just a suspicion, but founded on frequent observations over the past two decades or more.

Some of us want to find a cure, and never mind the kudos.

Other people just want the kudos.

The fact that we hear about another potential “drug that may cure Alzheimer’s disease” on an approximately weekly basis, underscores not only the frantic need for a cure, but the fact that none of the alleged cures actually work. As we say in medicine, when you have dozens of professed cures for a disease, you can be pretty sure that none of them actually do a damn thing. The more strident the claims for “the cure” the more you should suspect an absence of data. When there is a cure and when it works, it will be a single intervention and you’ll know it works because, guess what, it will actually work.

I regret that the media gets caught up in the inflated claims, but it speaks to the public’s hunger to believe. One of these days, it won’t be a claim and it won’t be inflated, it will simply be the facts. When we finally have the facts, it will be because we have shown we can cure Alzheimer’s disease and it will be Telocyte on the cover, but only after we cure Alzheimer’s.