A “game-changing” new drug offers both hope and time to some people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, says the head of a St. Joseph’s program that played a key role in the medication’s clinical trials. Health Canada has newly approved lecanemab (brand name Leqembi, developed by Eisai Co. and Biogen), which has been shown to slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease in people with mild symptoms.
St. Joseph’s Health Care London, and its innovation arm at Lawson Research Institute, has played a key role as one of multiple sites that have trialed the drug.
“This is game-changing,” says Dr. Michael Borrie, medical director of the Aging Brain and Memory Clinic at St. Joseph’s, whose work in dementia research and clinical practice spans more than three decades.
“We’ve been working for over 20 years to find a compound that is disease-modifying. This is the first approved drug in Canada that addresses the underlying pathology of Alzheimer’s, not just the symptoms.”
Lecanemab works by removing amyloid proteins that accumulate as sticky clumps in the brain and are associated with cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s. “It reverses one aspect of the disease by removing the plaque from the brain ,” Borrie explains.
“You can characterize its benefit in terms of time saved. If you were to have this medication for four years, you can ‘save’ one year of cognitive decline. It totally changes the course of their neurodegeneration in a way we haven’t seen before.”
Lecanemab was one of many clinical drug trials assigned to research coordinator Kayla Vander Ploeg when she arrived to work at St. Joseph’s more than a decade ago. “For so long, we had hope that one of these medications would benefit patients long-term. Now we have more than hope. We have results,” Vander Ploeg says.
“Today I’m seeing people who say, ‘my dad or my mom was in this study, and now there’s hope for me.’ ”
There are specific eligibility criteria, including confirmed diagnosis – through cognitive testing and through advanced brain imaging and biomarker tests – plus screening to rule out two gene variations that couldresult in more side effects.
Canada is now one of 51 countries to have approved lecanemab.
Borrie cautioned that Health Canada approval doesn’t necessarily translate to funding coverage. It’s not yet determined who will pay for the medication, or how: when lecanemab was approved in the United States in 2023, the annual cost per patient was more than $26,000.
The length of time from drug development to trials to approval illustrates how painstaking pharmaceutical research can be. But it also highlights how integrating health research into hospital settings can translate more quickly into improved patient care.
