Strategies, Development, and Pitfalls of Therapeutic Options for Alzheimer's Disease

Therapeutic options for Alzheimer's disease are currently limited to symptomatic treatment that only provides modest and temporary maintenance of cognitive and memory functions, without altering disease progression. Although a variety of therapeutics targeting amyloid production or plaque degradation as well as tau hyperphosphorylation and aggregation have been proposed, examined in pre-clinical models and introduced into clinical trials, many have failed to provide significant therapeutic benefit. Concerns over the adequacy of currently used pre-clinical models, in addition to questions pertaining to the timing of therapeutic administration, vis-à-vis synaptic and neuronal loss have been raised, and are further complicated by the genetic diversity of individual patients. This review will provide a brief overview of Alzheimer's disease pathophysiology and the currently approved therapeutics, while the main section will focus on therapeutics currently evaluated in pre-clinical models and clinical trials.