ISTOCK, SUDOK1A small clinical trial testing the safety of administering young people’s blood plasma to treat Alzheimer’s disease has found that the approach may slightly improve patients’ cognitive function, according to researchers at Stanford University. However, the results, presented on Saturday (November 4) at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in Boston, have already been criticized due to the study’s small size, problems in the trial design, and a lack of plausible mechanism of action for the treatment.
“The scientific basis for the trial is simply not there,” Irina Conboy, a neurologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Nature. “The effects of young blood on cognition have not been replicated by an independent group, and there has never been a test with a mouse model of Alzheimer’s.”
The current trial’s rationale comes from work in the lab of Stanford’s Tony Wyss-Coray, who had previously shown that young mouse blood could improve physical and cognitive function in older mice. The California-based startup Alkahest, founded in 2014 by Wyss-Coray, gained approval to test the approach in Alzheimer’s patients a couple years ago.
But the trial itself, initially designed to be placebo-controlled, did not go according to plan. To begin with, nine patients with mild ...
