GE’s (Almost) Alzheimer’s Agreement

Yesterday, GE announced a major research initiative with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization for its investigational PET imaging agent [18F]Flutemetamol.  Only….here’s the thing…it looks like there isn’t actually an agreement.

GE issued their press release on June 11.  Approx. 23 hours later, GE issued a full kill and retraction of the announcement.  The retraction from the vendor BusinessWire noted:
“GE Healthcare requests that their press release NewsItemId: 20120611005522 (issued June 11, 2012) entitled ‘GE Healthcare Furthers Research and Development Efforts in Alzheimer’s Disease with Australian Government Partnership’ be killed.  The release was issued prematurely by GE Healthcare.”

One can come to one of two possible conclusions.  First, Flutemetamol is encountering significant headwinds in the trial process.  This is probably the case.  Last year, GE’s Ger Brophy made a lot of strong claims about Flutemetamol and GE has become very silent recently about Flutemetamol.  Second, this press release was a big “oops” and there never was an agreement with the Australian government.  One has to wonder if heads will roll over this and if this was a mistake by Aleisia Gibson or someone else.