THE LEVER – Six years ago, Genevieve Lane was enjoying an active life in Florida when she began to forget her neighbors’ names and where she put her keys.
At 76, she might have shrugged off these lapses as mere signs of aging, but when she began to have moments of confusion and occasionally got lost while out walking, her housemate and longtime friend Vicki Holmes told her about a nearby research center.
There, a doctor diagnosed her with early Alzheimer’s disease and told her about a study testing a promising new drug. Lane enrolled, telling her daughter she wanted to have more time.
Soon after she started receiving the twice-monthly infusions, she and Holmes believed her memory was improving. “In the beginning, we really thought it was working,” said Holmes.
But Lane was not on the drug; she was getting the placebo, infusions of saline. When the trial concluded after 18 months, she began receiving the real drug, brand-named Leqembi, as part of the study’s extension phase.
Six weeks later, Lane was dead.
Lane’s family asked for an autopsy. “I thought the drug killed her,” Yvonne Battaglia, her daughter, told The Lever. “I didn’t trust the drug or the drug company.”
But the research firm hired by the drugmaker and the hospital where she died both said they could not conduct an autopsy. So Battaglia and her family hired an independent neuropathologist themselves.
The pathologist found Lane’s brain littered with ruptured blood vessels, widespread inflammation, and areas of dead cells. A second autopsy, performed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where the family donated her brain, confirmed the cause of death: severe cerebral inflammation, likely due to Leqembi.
She was not the only patient harmed while taking the drug …
