History of TauRx

For three decades, Professor Claude Wischik, co-founder and CEO of TauRx, has led a scientific research team dedicated to find an effective treatment for neurodegenerative disease.

Professor Wischik is a board-certified psychiatrist and holder of a Chair in Mental Health at the University of Aberdeen. He, along with his scientific research team, pioneered the early-stage research into tau aggregation inhibitors (TAIs) to slow and halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and similar neurodegenerative conditions. The results of this foundational research showed promise and TauRx was founded in 2002 to continue the work towards the development of an effective treatment for the disease. The company remains closely linked to the University of Aberdeen to this day and its strong research capability has been built through long-term cooperative relationships with multiple academic institutions around the world.

Having discovered a new pathway to treating Alzheimer’s disease, TauRx conducted a large Phase 2 clinical trial involving 321 patients with mild and moderate Alzheimer’s and using the company’s first-generation TAI, rember^®. The successful results of the study were presented in 2008 and showed that the rate of Alzheimer’s progression in treated subjects was reduced by 90% over a 2-year period. These findings supported the progression of the project into an initial Phase 3 clinical trial programme completed in 2016 using the company’s second generation TAI. This programme involved over 1,900 patients and comprised three separate trials: two in Alzheimer's disease and one in the rare neurodegenerative disorder, behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia.

TauRx is currently conducting a confirmatory phase 3 trial, the Lucidity study, designed to use the knowledge gained from previous trials to prove the efficacy of our compound at low dose and as monotherapy (given in isolation of symptomatic treatments). Results of this study are expected in 2022.