Monday, 18 August 2003: 15:45-17:15 | |||
S019 New Drug Development in Psychogeriatrics | |||
| Detecting therapeutic or preventive effects of pharmacological intervention on cognitive functioning and on cognitive decline has proven a difficult and at times a daunting task. This is because the totality of cognitive functioning is a result of many discrete interactive, probably involving multiple genes and several environmental effects, mostly unknown. Hence even in elderly apparently healthy individuals, it is difficult to predict the onset of cognitive decline and the rate of decline, once the cognitive impairment has becomes apparent. Taken together these obstacles make trials of drugs designed to benefit cognition, lengthy, labor intensive and in the end expensive. To overcome these obstacles it is necessary to a) investigate and understand specific the pathophysiology(s) responsible for cognitive impairment and to devise appropriate remedies and b) to devise sensitive measurements and accurate surrogate markers that can detect cognitive benefits over brief period of times, and without the need to conduct trials of several hundred individual for each trial arm . In addition to the traditional manual and computerized tests of memory, other candidate surrogate markers currently under investigation are: PET-FDG, PET scans indirectly measuring cerebral amyloid, MRI measurements of discrete areas of the hippocampus and fMRI. Measures and study designs specifically tailored to the disease, patient severity and drug class should will be that maximize the likelihood of detecting a drug effect will be discussed. Psychometric and biological markers that might serve as pharmakodynamic measures in proof of concept studies will be presented. | |||
| Chair: | Michael Davidson | ||
| S019-001 New Drug Development Michael Davidson | |||
| S019-002 Early Phase Clinical Development of Drugs for Cognitive Disorders Richard C. Mohs | |||
| S019-003 Beyond the Cholinergic Hypothesis? Challenges in Developing the Next Generations of Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease Michael J. Pontecorvo | |||
| S019-004 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Elucidating Mechanism of Action and Drug Discovery in Alzheimer’s Disease Tonmoy Sharma | |||
| S019-005 PET Surrogate Markers for Early Diagnosis, Disease Monitoring, and Drug Development in Alzheimer’s Disease Gary Small | |||
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