Medical research charities have called on drug firms not to give up on funding dementia research, after the United States pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced it was to halt its research into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Pfizer said it would abandon its efforts to develop novel drugs for the two diseases and eliminate 300 jobs from its neuroscience and early development programmes at US locations, according to an Alzheimer‘s Society announcement released on 8 January.
The move follows a series of failed attempts by drug companies to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s. In 2016, Pfizer halted a study on a drug targeting a serotonin receptor in the brain, on the basis that it was expected to fail. Four years earlier, it had ended its research into a drug called bapineuzumab, which failed to show results in clinical trials.
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