What controls should Cassava Sciences use for their open label trial?

MDs gradually woke up to the fallacy of using historical rather than concurrent controls particularly in studies of therapies to prevent heart attack and stroke, as the rates of both dropped significantly in the past 50 years, and survival from individual heart attacks and strokes also improved.

An open label trial is just that, no placebo, no controls.  Such trials are done in the exploratory phase of drug development to look for side effects and (hopefully) therapeutic effects.

Cassava Sciences has been attacked because their open label study of Simufilam had no controls.  Duh !

Here is a suggestion for the concurrent controls for the Cassava study:  the Biogen study leading to approval of aducanumab (Aduhelm).  It’s a little hard to find out exactly when it was done, but it certainly was within the past 10 years. Here is a link to an article on Alzheimer therapy from Science — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/373/6555/624.full.pdf

Cassava’s work is nowhere to be found.  The article contains the following

“Although the marked decrease in amyloid deposits can be viewed as biological evidence of disease modification, this was accompanied by a decidedly mixed outcome on cognitive testing, with one aducanumab trial (EMERGE, NCT02484547) meeting its prespecified primary and secondary endpoints at the highest dose, whereas the other (ENGAGE, NCT02477800) did not achieve them.”

So use Biogen’s data on aducanumab as the placebo control (which I and the FDA advisory committee think it is).  There is a reason the entire committee resigned after the FDA approved the drug.

Nightmare on Wall Street

I’ve written several posts about Cassava Biosciences (symbol SAVA) and their potential drug for Alzheimer’s (see the end). The recent approval of Biogen’s ineffective (but highly lucrative) therapy Aducanumab for the disease brings forth the following nightmare. At a cost of > $50,000/year and millions of desperate famililes, Biogen will soon be rolling in money. The Cassava drug is orally available and should cost a fraction of that. Even better — it may actually work, although I think serious side effects are likely. Given the sketchy data getting Aducanumab through the FDA, Cassava’s drug represents a real threat to Biogen.

It will be perfectly legal for Biogen to outright buy Cassava and stop development. They will have the money. They won’t be able to do it on the sly, as any position of one company (or individual) in another greater than 5% of the value of the company must be reported to the SEC where it becomes public knowledge.

This from a cousin who is a stock market guru. His wife wasn’t available when I called being next door taking care of a woman with early Alzheimer’s, whose husband had to leave as his father suddenly passed away. She can’t be left alone. Such is the market for Aducanumab.

So will my friend Lindsay and her husband have the moral strength to resist Biogen?

Back in the day when I was in the service in Denver, a very wealthy stockbroker (who had brought the waterPik public) bought up many of beautiful old mansions on the west side of Cheeseman park. He then sold them to people he trusted (such as ourselves), so they wouldn’t be broken up into apartments (which was quite lucrative). I asked why the other people living on Humboldt street didn’t do the same. He said they had so much money they didn’t need character. The folks at Cassava don’t have a hell of a lot of money but hopefully they do have character.

Other posts on Cassava should you be interested are

The science behind Cassava Sciences (SAVA)

Montana girl does good, real good !