Tag Archives: ASOs

ASOs: sci-fi takes a step closer to reality

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Great news from Biogen about an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) designed to reduce production of the tau protein. 

First, some background: Most of you have heard about ASOs, but for a refresher, see these posts of mine from 2022 and 2026.  Here’s a slightly more technical but cutely animated explanation of ASOs from Harvard Medical School:

The elevator version is that an ASO is a short length of RNA that binds and inactivates the brain’s messenger RNA for a specific protein – or an abnormal version thereof – to prevent it from carrying the protein’s genetic code from the DNA to the protein-manufacturing machinery.  In theory, the production of any protein involved in the cause of a disease can be reduced by designing an appropriate ASO to bind to a segment of that protein’s messenger RNA.

The FDA has approved only one ASO so far – for a childhood muscle disorder called spinal muscular atrophy – but dozens of other ASOs are in the development pipeline for other conditions, including tauopathies. Biogen is currently testing its anti-tau ASO, called diranersen (formerly BIIB-080) against Alzheimer’s, by far the most common tauopathy.  A few days ago, they announced the results of a Phase 2 study of its safety and tolerability.  Here’s Biogen’s press release and here’s the description of the trial (without results) in clinicaltrials.gov. 

Diranersen was well-tolerated in people with Alzheimer’s, as expected based on the Phase 1 results.  The big news was that the rate of accumulation of abnormal tau protein aggregation actually did slow down, as measured by levels of tau in the spinal fluid and by positron emission tomographic (PET) images of the tau protein’s distribution in the brain. The press release didn’t say how much slowing occurred, but it was apparently enough to convince Biogen to proceed to a Phase 3 trial and to convince the FDA to let them do so. More details will be presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London in July 2026.

The trial was not primarily designed to assess slowing of progression of the participants’ actual cognitive loss, but it gathered that information anyway in various forms.  The primary such test, called the “Clinical Dementia Rating Scale Sum of Boxes,” measures memory, orientation, judgment/problem solving, community affairs, home/hobbies, and personal care. It did not show a statistically significant slowing of progression for diranersen in Alzheimer’s, but the press release hints that there was some slight, statistically non-significant, degree of slowing.  

That’s all about Alzheimer’s. For PSP, a different company, Novartis, is testing a different anti-tau ASO (NIO-752).  It is also well tolerated, as demonstrated by a recently-completed Phase 1 trial.  If the brain’s accumulation of abnormal tau can be slowed down in Alzheimer’s disease, as the Biogen press release claims, then presumably PSP can achieve the same result.  Novartis says it’s still (as of May 15, 2026) analyzing its Phase 1 PSP efficacy results, but those would have to be spectacular to show statistical significance in so small a study.  That company will soon start testing NIO-752 in a Phase 2 PSP trial in the US and other countries, so keep an eye on clinicaltrials.gov for enrollment instructions.

Given these new results of one anti-tau ASO in one tauopathy, what are the prospects for a different anti-tau ASO in a different tauopathy?  I’ll duck the issue and call them promising but far from a slam dunk. That will be the topic of a future post, but what I can say right now is even these modest, preliminary signs of success with ASOs in tauopathies would have been science fiction back when I was in med school 50 years ago.

He said he was just going out to buy cigarettes . . .

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Yeah, yeah.  I know I haven’t posted anything in the past two years other than responses to questions.  No, I don’t know why.  But those who stray can be redeemed, I’m told.  So here’s the first installment of a quick and dirty summary of most of the important news in the world of PSP from 2018 and 2019:

I’ve mentioned with breathless hope the two large trials of monoclonal antibodies directed against the tau protein, one sponsored by Biogen, the other by AbbVie.  Both were designed to detect slowing of the progressive decline in function as measured by the PSP Rating Scale.  Bad news.  Back in July 2019, AbbVie ended its study prematurely after an interim analysis showed no benefit and that continuing the study would be futile.  Biogen completed its study in October and announced in early December that its results were no better than AbbVie’s.  In each case, there were no important adverse effects.  But each company is continuing development of its respective antibody for Alzheimer’s disease.  Those results won’t be available for a few years.

But there’s still hope for anti-tau antibodies in PSP.  Both the Biogen and the AbbVie antibodies were designed to recognize the “N terminal,” so-called because of its unattached amino group, which is based on nitrogen.  (The other end is called the “C terminal” because of its unattached acid group, which is based on carbon.)  But other drug companies are developing antibodies targeting other parts of the tau molecule, and they haven’t announced any intention to abandon those programs.  Next out of the gate will be the big Belgian company UCB, whose antibody targets the “microtubule-binding domain” of the tau molecule, which is much closer to the C terminal.  Its Phase 1 trial has started at selected centers in Europe and in the works is a larger, Phase 3 trial that will include sites in the US.  Still other anti-tau antibodies are being tested in Alzheimer’s by Lilly, Roche/Genentech and Johnson & Johnson, and there’s no reason to think that those antibodies couldn’t work just as well against PSP.

Other treatment ideas are approaching clinical trials as well.  The closest are the “OGA inhibitors,” which I described in a 2017 post.  Three companies are working on those: Asceneuron, Merck, and Lilly, though the last is just targeting Alzheimer’s so far.  I hope that Asceneuron’s trials will start in 2020, though my PSP treatment hopes have been dashed before. Also on deck are the “anti-sense oligonucleotides,” or ASOs, which prevent the tau molecule from being manufactured in the first place.  Such drugs are already on the market for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy and hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis, each of which affects the muscles or nerves rather than the brain and are not tau disorders.

You’ll recall that a new set of diagnostic criteria for PSP was published in 2017.  It’s called the MDS-PSP Criteria after the Movement Disorder Society (now renamed the “International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society” for obscure reasons), which sponsored the project.  New criteria were necessary to recognize early stages of PSP, when enrollment in treatment trials (and later, in treatment) would be most advantageous, and also to recognize the recently-described PSP subtypes.  In the past two years, a few studies have validated the criteria to some extent by comparing autopsy results with how closely patients satisfied the criteria during life.  Just last month, researchers in the UK found that applying the new criteria allowed them to expand their population with PSP by 74%.  The new patients were those with the “atypical” forms of PSP that went unacknowledged by the older criteria published in 1996.  The thing is, most of the “atypical” PSP patients will evolve to also satisfy the criteria for typical PSP, which we call PSP-Richardson syndrome, or PSP-RS.  So they would eventually have been recognized as PSP, but usually after years of erroneous diagnoses, unnecessary tests and futile, expensive and inconvenient treatments.

Quite enough for now.  I’ll continue these updates more faithfully, only next time it will get more technical.  Careful what you wish for.