Senior Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official Lee Fleisher described the game plan behind the CMS-facilitated patient registry for the new Alzheimer’s disease treatment, but former CMS official Sean Tunis is still concerned the approach won’t meet data expectations in the planned two-year window.

Ability to use beta amyloid plaque reduction to support a traditional approval In Alzheimer’s, or for use with other drug classes, needs to be evaluated case-by-case based on the available data, agency says. In the HIV/AIDS space, it took FDA decades to declare a surrogate endpoint validated.

From positive topline data to Robert Califf weighing in on the right patient population to treat with the Alzheimer’s candidate in less than a day, the drug rejected by the agency for accelerated approval earlier this year looks to make a quick comeback.

‘Clear signal’ in the ATLAS study of presymptomatic, SOD1 mutation carriers could provide evidence needed to confirm tofersen’s benefit in symptomatic ALS patients, FDA’s Teresa Buracchio says, adding that getting confirmatory evidence from the VALOR open-label extension ‘could be a little more tricky.’