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Actinogen zeroes in on an Alzheimer’s treatment

• Actinogen’s pivotal Alzheimer’s trial has passed a crucial ‘futility’ analysis
• The company is raising up to $15 million to further its drug candidate, Xanamem
• Xanamem targets a different mechanism of action to other failed Alzheimer’s drugs

When a drug developer raises funds on the back of its purported unbridled commercial potential, it’s instructive to see who is putting up the money.

The only ASX-listed developer of an Alzheimer’s disease treatment, Actinogen Medical (ASX:ACW) this week outstretched its corporate paws for $12 million, in a well-supported placement.

The company also eyes a further $5 million by way of a share placement plan.

The timing of the whip-‘round is not arbitrary.

Last week, Actinogen announced that its pivotal phase IIb/III trial had passed an independent data monitoring committee (DMC) review.

While that sounds as riveting as visiting a stone-deaf great aunt, the DMC confirmed the 247-patient Xanamia trial should continue as it is.

In other words, the study passed the ‘futility’ test.

The patient data remains blinded until a top-line ‘reveal’ in November.

While one swallow does not maketh a summer, CEO Dr Stephen Gourlay says the DMC ruling removes any “catastrophic downside” to the program.

The company is not privy to the study data. But Gourlay was confident enough to invest $500,000 in the placement, taking his total personal investment to $2.5 million.

Other directors put their cahunas on the line for $167,000.

Gourlay is banking on Xanamia not being another case of ‘here we go again’ – another failure in the Alzheimer’s treatment wasteland.

If he’s right, the company’s drug candidate Xanamem could be the only effective remedy in an addressable market worth well over US$20 billion.

The amyloid red herring

The fastest growing chronic ailment of the  current century, Alzheimer’s was discovered by German neurologist Dr Alois Alzheimer in 1906.

(As an aside, how would storied clinicians feel about their name being attached to an insidious  malady?)

Doctors hitherto had classed the condition as dementia, but Dr Alzheimer isolated a protein called amyloid in some dementia patients.

Naturally, drug developers have since focused on inhibiting amyloids, with regulators approving the first approved drugs in the 1990s.

Since then big pharma reportedly has spent $US50 billion on developing ineffective amyloid drugs, with poor side effects.

Gourlay says these drugs DO remove amyloids from the brain – but don’t actually ameliorate the condition.

“In essence, patients still don’t have anything that has a clinically significant effect,” he says. “Doctors using these drugs cannot tell whether the patient is getting a clinical benefit or not.”

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