Pin pulled on Alzheimer's research

Drug companies are giving up on Alzheimer's research.

DRUG companies are calling off the search for an Alzheimer's wonder drug after more than a dozen expensive failures, prompting Australian scientists to call for greater public investment.

With drug trials costing up to $1 billion and no guarantee of success, companies - including Pfizer and AstraZeneca - are increasingly opting for simpler projects with more chance of yielding a financial windfall.

The head researcher in neural plasticity and regeneration at the Garvan Institute, Bryce Vissel, said drug companies were too quick to give up on trials to develop a drug to cure or better manage Alzheimer's disease. 

In the US, the Obama Administration has moved to fill the void created by the mass exodus of drug companies with an extra $130 million over the next two years.

In Australia, the Prime Minister has announced a 10-year plan to reshape aged care but Dr Vissel said it was a shame the $3.7 billion Living Longer Living Better plan did not include additional funding for research into the most common form of dementia.

"If you think that the cost of dementia is going to be $83 billion by 2060, it seems to makes some sense to put some money and some investment in dementia research," he said.

"At the moment we put in $24 million in Australia but there have been calls for $250 million a year, which against the costs we're going to be facing is pretty well insignificant."

A senior lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Adelaide, Ian Musgrave, said some scientists believed the brain of an Alzheimer's sufferer began to change about 25 years before symptoms began to show.

If the theory holds, that could mean that trials, which were typically conducted on people battling symptoms, needed to be overhauled.

"If this disease is beginning 25 years before we see overt symptoms then by the time we are starting a lot of these trials ... it may be impossible to reverse," he said.

About 300,000 Australians suffer from dementia, the most common form of which is Alzheimer's, costing the economy $5 billion a year.

There are four drugs available to help sufferers.

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