Amezosvatein

Dementia affects more than 55 million people worldwide and has been the leading cause of death in the U.K. for the past two years.\n After multiple studies have suggested a link between its shingles vaccine and dementia prevention, GSK is taking advantage of a natural experiment to look for more definitive evidence that the shot can reduce dementia risk.The Big Pharma is teaming up with fellow British institutions the UK Dementia Research Institute and Health Data Research UK to study the health records of about 1.4 million patients, some of whom have already received GSK’s Shingrix (recombinant zoster vaccine) and some who haven’t yet.“Retrospective analysis has limitations, and given the importance of dementia we felt it was important to begin to explore a more robust approach to finding a potential connection between shingles vaccination and dementia,” Tony Wood, Ph.D., GSK’s chief scientific officer, said in a press call in advance of the March 25 announcement.Dementia affects more than 55 million people worldwide and has been the leading cause of death in the U.K. for the past two years.The new study, called EPI-Zoster-110, takes advantage of the September 2023 expansion of the U.K.’s national shingles immunization program. At that point, adults aged 65 became eligible to receive Shingrix, while adults aged 66 at the time have to wait until they turn 70 to take the vaccine. Because age at the time of the program’s expansion is the only deciding factor in whether someone has gotten the vaccine yet, this in effect created two randomized cohorts.The research team will collect data from patients’ electronic health records, held by the U.K.’s National Health Service, that will enable them to control for factors like ethnicity, geographic location and socioeconomic background. The primary analysis will center on the four-year span from the start of the program’s expansion until the 66-year-olds turn 70 and become eligible for Shingrix, according to a March 25 release. “It offers us an opportunity to look at two very similar and controlled populations and balance the role of vaccination versus no vaccination in assessing the outcome with regards to cognitive impairment and dementia,” Wood said in the call.A 2024 study (PDF) published in Nature Medicine took advantage of a similar situation in the U.S., where Shingrix was first approved in 2017. Researchers compared the health records of patients who received a different, live virus shingles vaccine in the years before Shingrix’s approval to those who received Shingrix after its approval. Patients given Shingrix had lower risk for developing dementia than patients given an earlier vaccine.As dementia’s burden in the U.K. increases, the country has been turning more and more attention to tackling the disease. British investment firm SV Health Investors announced last week that it had secured $250 million to launch its second fund focused on financing first-in-class therapeutics for dementia.And Alchemab Therapeutics, a beneficiary of SV Health’s first dementia-focused fund, signed a deal with Eli Lilly in January to develop up to five new antibodies for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that can co-occur with dementia.