Lee County research center helps study anti-Alzheimer’s drugs

A South Fort Myers research center has helped study new drugs approved by the FDA to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

The Neuropsychiatric Research Center of Southwest Florida, located at 14271 Metropolis Ave., is currently working with 250 Alzheimer’s patients in studies. Program director and neurologist Dr. Wendy Bond says that given our demographics, Southwest Florida is uniquely positioned to study the brain-busting disease.

“There’s probably about 30 million people in the United States who have Alzheimer’s currently, and it’s building here in southwest Florida; we’re at ground zero,” Bond said. “And that’s why we’ve been so good at enrolling people into these studies and getting them medicines.”

The center is currently involved in 20 studies looking for therapies that slow the disease’s progression, including a new class of drugs that target amyloid and tau proteins linked to plaque in the brain.

“We’re doing drug trials here that specifically target those proteins and actually can take them off of the brain,” Bond said. “There have been two drugs [that] have been recently FDA-approved for an Alzheimer’s-type dementia. One is Aduhelm and the other one is Leqembi.”

Study participants get tests and treatments not available to the public. Bond has seen these new drugs keep patients stable for as long as eight years, which makes her optimistic that medications may alter the course of Alzheimer’s

“We know that people who develop Alzheimer’s start building up these amyloid plaques 10 to 15 years before they show clinical symptoms,” Bond said. “If we can catch that early on, why not use these drugs before you start to develop the clinical symptoms?”

Alzheimer’s patients who want to get into a trial are referred to the center, where they are screened to see if they fit into one of the studies.