A small biotech that got hammered by investors when it unveiled disappointing results from a Phase 2 clinical trial of its Alzheimer’s drug last spring will report better news on Sunday. After following patients with advanced Alzheimer’s for an additional two weeks, Neurotrope (NTRP) found that the improved cognitive scores of those on a low dose of the compound, bryostatin, were large enough compared to patients in the control group to come within a whisker of statistical significance. And in subsets of the low-dose patients, the cognitive improvement cleared that statistical bar.
All of the follow-on analyses, which Neurotrope president and chief scientific officer Dr. Daniel Alkon will present at the Sachs’ Neuroscience Innovation Forum in San Francisco, were pre-specified in the statistical plan for the clinical trial, not post hoc — which is considered statistically suspect.
“We saw a persistent benefit of bryostatin at 15 weeks,” four weeks after patients received the last dose of drug, Alkon said. “It’s evidence that we’re not just slowing the rate of cognitive decline” as experimental drugs like Biogen’s aducanumab appear to do, “but flipping it, going from cognitive decline to cognitive improvement.”
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