system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What are the current major challenges for developing an Alzheimers treatment based on amyloid inhibiting drugs?

This is a naive question. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on it or point me to relevant articles/videos that speaks to this.

Since I presume a amyloid inhibition treatment is far from a novel idea, I was wondering what are the current the challenges with this approach. E.g. how many of these are valid statements? what other high level problems are there?

* It is largely unknown what regulates amyloid production,
* It is known that many separate processes produce amyloids, making inhibition a large scale problem,
* Insufficient knowledge to design something that inhibits amyloids without affecting other biochemical processes,
* No evidence that inhibting amyloids itself prevents/treats alzheimers

Thanks!
gpt
>No evidence that inhibting amyloids itself prevents/treats alzheimers

This is the main problem, and obviously it is a sufficiently huge problem that none of the others are as important. The antibody aducanumab, which has been in the news the last few months, has essentially overcome the other problems you mention. It's reasonably well tolerated (albeit with side effects like any drug), and reduces amyloid plaques successfully. The problem is there's no compelling evidence it actually improves clinical outcomes.