Get Morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, June 8th. I'm Nile Boone. Here's what we're

watching today. The Biden administration split stands on Puerto Ricans and Benefits. Plus, the

upside to online concerts. But first, today's one big thing, a controversial new drug for Alzheimer's.

The FDA has approved a new Alzheimer's drug for the first time in almost 20 years. It's to treat

the more than six million Americans with Alzheimer's disease. But the effectiveness of the drug

adjucanumab or adjuhelm is up for question. Bob Herman covers healthcare business for Axios. Hey,

Bob. Hey, Nile. So I think we have to start with just to be clear, the FDA has approved this for

Alzheimer's. But it's not clear how effective it is at treating Alzheimer's. That's right. So the

company that makes the drug biogen ran clinical trials. One of the clinical trials failed. And the

other maybe kind of sort of showed some clinical benefit. So the FDA issued an accelerated approval,

which basically said, we're going to approve this. But biogen, you have to conduct another study

to make sure it actually works. What do we know about what the drug actually does? In the trials,

the drug failed. But biogen went back and looked at the data and said, okay, we think it actually

made some of these brain plaques a decline, which they think might help slow the progress of Alzheimer's.

They're running with this theory that if you lessen these brain plaques, it'll help people

recover from Alzheimer's. Again, that's still not really proven. That's why biogen needs to run

another confirmatory trial to see if that's actually the case. Bob, how expensive is this?

The drug has a list price of $56,000 a year. And that price is the uninsured price. But since so

many Alzheimer's patients are on Medicare, Medicare likely, if it decides to do so, will pay probably

a large portion of that. There's so many families who are living with Alzheimer's. Why has it

been so hard to find treatments? Alzheimer's readers has been going on for decades. And there's been

this slowly building scientific consensus that says maybe this hypothesis about these brain plaques

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