UNDER DIFFERENT circum- stances, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval of the medication aducanumab might have been celebrated as one of the great therapeutic advances of 2021. The drug was proclaimed as the first medication to target the underlying pathology of Alzheimer's disease. The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer's affects more than 6 million people in the U.S. alone. Although a handful of older drugs can temporarily blunt its symptoms, none can slow the processes behind its devastating onslaught. Yet the FDA's ruling became one of the year's biggest scientific controversies. The roots of the brouhaha stretch back to March 2019, when aducanumab's developers, U.S.-based Biogen and Japan's Eisai, halted two large clinical trials after an independent monitoring committee determined that the drug showed no clinical benefit.
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