Alianza de...corporaciones : Para el progreso...?

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

Drug makers' attempts to find treatments for Alzheimer's disease have produced scant results and a long string of busts. Now a broad effort is under way to learn something from those failures.

A group of major pharmaceutical companies will share pooled data from failed clinical trials in an attempt to figure out what is going wrong in the studies and what can be done to improve drug development.

In the first wave, data from 4,000 patients across 11 failed Alzheimer's-drug clinical trials from Johnson & Johnson,GlaxoSmithKline PLC, AstraZeneca PLC, Sanofi-Aventis and Abbott Laboratories will be publicly available as of Friday.

Data from additional drug makers and the National Institutes of Health will be added in the future. The coalition aims to create similar pooled databases for Parkinson's disease and tuberculosis, said Marc Cantillon, executive director of the Coalition against Major Diseases, which spearheaded the project, funded by the Food and Drug Administration and Science Foundation Arizona.

The data will be available to all the participating drug makers, as well as outside researchers with a valid scientific question, Dr. Cantillon said.

"Companies said they're running into a stone wall with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," said Ray Woosley, chief executive of the Critical Path Institute, which oversees the coalition. "We really believe drugs are failing because we honestly don't understand the disease."

The hope is that this large database will help answer some questions that individual trials with just a couple of hundred patients can't answer, such as how the disease progresses and whether there are differences in subgroups in the population.

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