UW Medicine administers new Alzheimer’s drug for the first time

Doug Davidson had always been an active person.

In his younger years, he was a volunteer firefighter. He played “a fair amount” of football. He lifted weights. He even did 10K runs, he said.

Then, his memory started slipping.

For several years, Davidson’s wife, Barb, had noticed the changes.

He resisted going to the doctor to get tested, she said, “but we got to the point where he was noticing it, too. He had to face that something was happening.”

That was a little over a year ago, she said, shortly before Davidson was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s disease.

On Friday, the Mount Vernon resident became the first patient at Harborview Medical Center to receive a dose of a new medicine shown to slow the progression of the disease.

The U.S. Food and Drug Association approved the new drug, lecanemab (sold under its brand name Leqembi), this summer. The IV drug, created by Japanese drugmaker Eisai, is covered by Medicare and deemed safe and effective for patients with mild dementia and other symptoms caused by early Alzheimer’s. 

In recent months, researchers throughout the world have continued to test the drug and analyze its effects through a project called the AHEAD study, which includes participants from UW Medicine. Harborview Medical Center became one of the first hospitals on the West Coast to administer the drug Friday.

The study works with patients without symptoms but whose brains show signs of amyloid pathology, or evidence a certain protein is sticking together and forming plaques in the brain — one of the warning signs of Alzheimer’s, according to Dr. Michael Rosenbloom, a behavioral neurologist at UW Medicine who studies the disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The medicine notably shows evidence of causing a biological change, meaning the drug significantly reduced the amount of amyloid that researchers could detect, Rosenbloom said this summer. In clinical studies, some patients no longer had any detectable amyloid in the brain.

Davidson will receive IV treatment twice a month for 18 months as researchers analyze cognitive changes. If results come back showing improvements from the medicine, it could be a sign to more aggressively screen younger patients for Alzheimer’s changes, Rosenbloom said.

The drug’s prescribing information carries the most serious type of warning, meaning it can cause brain swelling and bleeding — problems that have also been seen with other Alzheimer’s drugs that target sticky brain plaque linked to the disease.

During treatment, patients will receive periodic MRI screenings to test for swelling, which is a “relatively common side effect” of lecanemab, Rosenbloom said, and bleeding.

If these side effects arise, treatment of the drug may be stopped, and patients may start taking other FDA-approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, which Davidson is also doing.

Participating in the study is a way to fight the disease, said Davidson, who is 72.

“I want to be 82,” he continued, “and I want to be able to be active.”

“This study is good for me, and it’s good for people down the road,” he said. “It feels right to get a jump on things, as opposed to just sitting in your rocking chair. I don’t want to do that.”

Over 50 people at UW Medicine helped create the “well-oiled infrastructure” for the study, which now has about eight patients cleared to participate and is progressing at “a greater pace than we expected,” Rosenbloom said in a Friday interview.

Before FDA approval, patients diagnosed with the brain-robbing disease had limited treatment options.

“Lecanemab is the first tipping point where we’re thinking about this disease differently,” Rosenbloom said this summer. “This is a huge sea change in the field.”

The memory-destroying disease affects about 6.7 million Americans 65 and older, a number that’s “growing fast,” according to the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association. Older Black Americans are about twice as likely to have Alzheimer’s or other dementia diseases, compared to older white Americans.

In Washington, about 120,000 adults 65 and older have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s as of this year, according to the association. In 2019, the disease killed more than 3,500 Washingtonians.