Pfizer to end research to develop new drugs for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease

Pfizer Inc will discontinue research to develop new drugs aimed at the treatment of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, the US pharmaceutical company announced on Saturday.

According to the company's emailed statement, it expects to eliminate 300 positions from the neuroscience discovery and early development programmes in Andover and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Groton, Connecticut, as it redistributes the money spent on research.

The pharma major will not make any changes to research and development funding for tanezumab, which is being tested as a treatment for joint pain from osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica, or its rare disease programme.

Pfizer has committed huge sums to research for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and is among a number of drugmakers, includng GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly, that is part of the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund launched in 2015 by industry and government groups that seeks to develop treatments for Alzheimer's.

But, a number of the company's investments have failed to deliver tangible results. In 2012, Pfizer and partner Johnson & Johnson gave up development of drug bapineuzumab after it failed to help patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's in its second round of clinical trials.

Pfizer said on Saturday that it intends to launch a new venture fund to invest in neuroscience research projects.

Advocates for victims of central nervous system diseases have given thumbs down to the development.

''It's really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system,'' James Beck, chief scientific officer at the Parkinson's Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times  yesterday. ''It's telling for how difficult it is to do research into neurodegenerative diseases.'' Of even greater concern, he said, is that ''having Pfizer exit does not augur well for what other companies are likely to do.''

A column in the newspaper titled, Pfizer, pocketing a big tax cut from Trump, will end investment in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research, says the company's move also raises questions about the role of Big Pharma in drug R&D, especially for conditions that have no known treatments or those with relatively few sufferers.