Charles Piller

And when you have this enormous set of incentives for professionals in the field who are very powerful and who are often the gatekeepers of knowledge, who are prominent scientists, whose work has been cited many thousands of times, whose ideas tend to dictate the trends in drug development and the trends in scientific thinking, when you have them working in lockstep with each other,

to try to reinforce what is ultimately their professional legacy and to prove out one way of thinking in the field, then you can have the effect of forestalling the ideas that might run contrary to that or

might just complement it in ways if they were not starved for funds, if they were not regarded as a secondary or lesser or not worth pursuing.

And I think what you had in the field is this dominance that crowded out other ways of thinking.

Now, I'm happy to say that

Thinking in the field is beginning to expand.

More and more, you're seeing people push back against the singularity of the amyloid hypothesis and to look at the aspects of it that might be extremely valuable to keep exploring, but also to expand out to other ways of thinking of the disease that might in themselves be equally valuable or might, in combination with research on amyloid and tau proteins, lead to better outcomes for patients.

Thanks, John.

I believe you're referring to two anti-amyloid antibody drugs.

Their names that they're sold under are Kusunla and Lakembi, and they've only been on the market a couple of years.

And these drugs were developed to strip amyloid proteins out of the brain with the idea that, again, if you do that, you are going to be preventing this cascade of biochemical effects that

lead to terrible dementia of Alzheimer's patients.

And large trials were done with these drugs.

These are human trials where people with mild symptoms of Alzheimer's or what they call pre-Alzheimer's symptoms, very mild dementia or memory loss symptoms,

join these trials, take the drugs for an extended period, and then they're compared against a group of people who are given a placebo, which is a kind of the classic sugar pill.

Although in this case, it's not a sugar pill because these are infused through a veins.

They're getting a dummy infusion that does not contain any drug in it.

And then they compared the results of these two groups.

And what they found is to a statistically measurable degree, statistically significant degree, the people who took these drugs, they just like the placebo group, their cognition declined, but it declined to a very slightly less rapid rate than the people on the placebo.

And so you say, well,