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A Vaccine for Alzheimer’s Disease? An Interview With AC Immune’s Prof Andrea Pfeifer

Swiss biopharma AC Immune has made targeting Alzheimer’s disease, the leading form of dementia, a top priority. The company’s numerous candidates and platforms target several different proteins and pathways thought to have a central role in Alzheimer’s pathology. 2020 has brought mixed news for AC Immune. In July, the company announced that their candidate tau vaccine, ACI-35.030, had shown “encouraging” safety data at a lower dose and was to be progressed to a higher-dose group. However, September brought the disappointing news that their anti-tau antibody, semorinemab, did not meet its primary efficacy endpoints in a Phase 2 trial. To discuss AC Immune’s work, Technology Networks spoke to CEO Prof. Andrea Pfeifer.

Ruairi Mackenzie (RM): Why should we be targeting tau in Alzheimer’s and why should we be trying to target it with a vaccine-based approach?

Andrea Pfeifer (AP): This is a question which goes very much to my heart, because we were one of the first companies in 2007 starting to work on tau and at that stage we were not sure how tau propagates from one cell to another and how it could propagate from one half of the brain to the other.

Since then, of course, the knowledge base has dramatically changed. Today, the two major, and I’m using my words very carefully, the two major targets linked to Alzheimer’s are definitely amyloid-β and tau. Despite the importance that is increasingly given to tau, amyloid-β still has a role in inducing the disease. There is very little or no disease if amyloid-β is absent, so that’s a very important thing.

The treatment windows when you can actually treat amyloid-β or tau are supposedly very different. In fact, the window for therapy of amyloid-β alone is probably the prevention stage in very early Alzheimer’s.