“So Aducanumab, I can tell you exactly when. Aducanumab was approved in July of 2021. Oh, wow. It was post-COVID. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, I thought it was pre-COVID. But it was a very controversial approval in the scheme of things, because there was an advisory board to the FDA that recommended against approval.”
“There was a lot of brouhaha around it, but it was approved. And I actually was one of the first adopters of Aducanumab, because I thought that despite the controversy, I felt that if we could move the needle a little bit for patients with Alzheimer's, it was worth trying. So I started using it, and because the drug had a greater than 40% incidence of abnormal brain bleeding and brain swelling”
“What is the annual cost of Lacanumab and Aducanumab? They cost? The drugs themselves cost about $26,000, but then there's the administration fees, which can range, you know, sometimes in institutional settings, they can be as high as $10,000 just to infuse the drug, versus you go into an infusion center, it could be $400.”
“And this was one of, he was on Aducanumab. He was a 4-4 patient. He was in his early 60s. And he had been on Aducanumab, a slow titration, and he had gone up to eight milligrams per kilogram, and at month 19 or 18, he developed, on MRI, significant ARIA-E.”