Alector and GSK just lost an Alzheimer’s drug after a 367-patient trial hit futility

Alector and GSK, the British drugmaker, just lost a mid-stage Alzheimer’s program that once came wrapped in a $700 million upfront partnership. Alector said it will discontinue the Phase 2 PROGRESS-AD trial of nivisnebart, also called AL101 or GSK4527226, after an independent monitoring committee ran a planned interim check and found the drug was unlikely to work well enough to hit the study's main goal.

That is the real item in the Endpoints roundup. Avalyn's upsized IPO priced at $18 a share for expected gross proceeds of $300 million, but that is routine biotech financing tape. The harder signal is that a placebo-controlled Alzheimer’s study stopped early and the companies still have not shown the full data behind the decision.

According to Alector’s discontinuation release, full PROGRESS-AD results will be shared at a future medical meeting or congress. Until then, the public record is narrow. The sources show that the trial stopped after a planned review found it was unlikely to succeed on its primary endpoint. They do not yet show whether the problem was the drug target, the dose, the endpoint, patient selection, or something else.

The study was not tiny. When Alector announced first-patient dosing in February 2024, the company said PROGRESS-AD was expected to enroll about 282 patients globally over 76 weeks. The public record at ClinicalTrials.gov now lists actual enrollment at 367 participants and describes the trial as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 study.

The stop also arrived fast. In February 2026 financial results, Alector was still guiding investors toward an interim futility analysis in the first half of 2026 and said it had $256 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments at the end of 2025, enough to fund operations at least through 2027.

This program came out of a much larger partnership. In 2021, Alector and GSK said their immuno-neurology collaboration included $700 million in upfront payments and as much as $1.5 billion in additional milestone payments. Nivisnebart was designed to raise progranulin, a protein involved in cell maintenance and immune signaling, by blocking sortilin. In a peer-reviewed paper in Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, Alector researchers and collaborators wrote that preclinical studies increased progranulin levels by up to twofold in cerebrospinal fluid and up to fourfold in blood.

That same paper also marks an important limit on what was known before Phase 2. The authors wrote that the Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers was built to assess safety and tolerability, not to detect changes in exploratory neurodegeneration biomarkers. So the public record supports a narrow conclusion. A large Alzheimer’s partnership advanced a biologically motivated drug into a mid-stage study, and that study stopped early after an interim check found it was unlikely to hit its primary endpoint. Why it failed is still waiting on the full data.