Michal Schwartz's immune-based Alzheimer's therapy passes first clinical test

On 15 July 2026 the journal Nature Medicine published the results of a phase 1b clinical trial of IBC-Ab002, an experimental Alzheimer's treatment built on decades of research by Professor Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Weizmann Institute announced the results the same day.

Most Alzheimer's drugs approved in recent years attack the amyloid plaques that build up in patients' brains. Schwartz, an Israel Prize laureate in the life sciences, has argued for a different route. Her work showed that the brain, long thought to be sealed off from the immune system, actually relies on immune cells for its upkeep and repair, and that the ageing of the immune system feeds the inflammation that drives brain diseases. In mice, her team found that briefly easing an immune brake known as the PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint helped clear damaged cells from the brain, reduced inflammation and improved memory.

To bring the idea to patients, Schwartz co-founded the company ImmunoBrain, which licensed the technology from Yeda, Weizmann's technology-transfer arm, and designed IBC-Ab002, a short-lived antibody against PD-L1 tailored for brain disease rather than cancer. The randomised, double-blind trial enrolled 40 people with early Alzheimer's at 11 hospitals in the United Kingdom, Israel and the Netherlands. It was led clinically by Dr Tommaso Croese, a former student in Schwartz's lab now at ImmunoBrain, and Professor Catherine Mummery of University College London's Dementia Research Centre.

As is normal for an early-stage study, the main goal was safety. The antibody was safe and well tolerated at every dose tested and behaved in the body as designed. Patients who received it also showed lower levels of biomarkers linked to nerve-cell damage and to the loss of synapses, the connections between neurons. Those signals are encouraging but preliminary; larger trials will be needed to learn whether the approach slows memory loss.