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re: pbt good news b/o Prana’s Alzheimer’s drug shows continued promise in
extended clinical trial
Melbourne, Australia – Friday April 16, 2004: Professor Colin Masters, a Director of
Prana Biotechnology Limited (NASDAQ: PRAN, ASX: PBT) and Chairman of the
Company's Scientific Advisory Board, today will present data from the extended Phase II
trial of Prana’s drug, PBT-1, at the 8th International Springfield/Montreal Symposium on
Advances in Alzheimer's Disease.
At a session devoted to novel treatments of Alzheimer’s disease, Professor Masters will
report that the use of PBT-1 for 18 months markedly slowed the decline in cognitive
function associated with Alzheimer's disease compared with the predicted level of
decline available from the scientific literature. In addition the longer term treatment was
well tolerated.
The extension study was conducted over 48 weeks following the formal trial period of the
trial of 36 weeks. Nine of the original 18 patients completed the extension.
Speaking from Montreal, Professor Masters stated that the outcome for patients in the
extension study provided confirmatory and new evidence that MPACs such as PBT-1
may form the next generation of agents for the treatment of Alzheimer’s by slowing or
stopping the disease rather than just dealing with the symptoms.
Dr Sam Gandy, Director of the Farber Institute for Neurosciences at Thomas Jefferson
University, Philadelphia, commented: “This PBT-1 (clioquinol) extension study reaffirms
the safety and possible efficacy of this new class of drug for Alzheimer's disease. It will
now be important to confirm the trend toward benefit in a larger trial with sufficient
numbers of subjects to establish statistical significance.
“Overall, anti-amyloid, “plaque-busting” drugs such as PBT-1 (clioquinol) provide a
powerful approach toward proof of principle regarding the relationship between amyloid
and cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease," said Dr Gandy.
The biannual Symposium on Advances in Alzheimer's Disease is organized by the
Southern Illinois University (SIU) School of Medicine in Springfield, Illinois, the
Department of Geriatrics at the Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve, Switzerland, and the
McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, Quebec.
Recently (March 26) Prana announced that Forbes.com had added PBT-1 to its list of
“neurological drugs to watch”, highlighting the most promising experimental drugs to
treat diseases of the brain and nervous system.
Prana also recently announced (7 April) that a publication in the Journal of Neuroscience
added further support to Prana’s theory that metals in the brain, rather than proteins on
their own, are responsible for the pathology of Alzheimer’s Disease and that attenuating
the action of these metals, with drugs like PBT-1, may hold the key to effective
therapeutic intervention.