A new era for Alzheimer's treatment begins at home

Kneu welcomes recent FDA approval of the first at-home starting dose for a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. The approval for a subcutaneous formulation of lecanemab that patients can administer themselves, at home, with an autoinjector pen represents one of the most significant changes in the treatment of Alzheimer’s in years.  

What's changed

Currently, lecanemab is only given to patients as an intravenous infusion at a clinic every two weeks, with patients having to complete 18 months of infusions before they could move to at-home dosing. For patients and their families this means regular travel, time, and the logistical challenge of attending an infusion center for a year and a half. For health systems, it is a significant operational, administrative and financial burden, managing infusion capacity and staffing for a growing population of patients.

This FDA approval removes that requirement. Patients can now begin treatment at home with a weekly injection.

“This is a significant shift in how we can deliver treatment for people with Alzheimer's. Moving the starting doses into a patient’s home removes a real burden for patients and for stretched clinical teams. However, home treatment only works if it's properly supported. Patients and caregivers need training and reassurance, and clinicians still need to know treatment is being taken correctly and that potential side effects or complications are recognised promptly and escalated appropriately. These are important challenges to solve, and the Kneu platform was designed with them in mind.”

Dr Kinan Muhammed DPhil FRCP, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Kneu Health. Consultant Neurologist.

Why this matters beyond convenience

Making treatments available in a patient’s home makes them more accessible, more sustainable, and more personalised. Care fits around the person, rather than the person fitting around the care.

For patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's, this is important. Receiving treatment at home, supported by the people who know them best, is a fundamentally different experience from regularly attending a clinical setting.

It enables caregivers to play an active role in supporting their loved ones through what is a challenging period. For health systems facing rising demand and finite infusion capacity, home administration can help reach more patients without the same operational overheads.

Home care needs support to be safe care

Moving treatment into the home doesn't remove the clinical responsibility, it just relocates it. Lecanemab carries important safety considerations:

• It requires monitoring for side effects, including amyloid-related imaging abnormalities

• It depends on patients using it correctly and consistently. When a patient is injecting a treatment at home, clinical teams still need to know if the treatment is being taken as planned; whether symptoms are emerging; and if anything needs a closer look.

Answering those questions remotely, reliably, and at scale is the challenge that will determine whether at-home treatment delivers the benefits it promises.

Where we come in

This is exactly the kind of care Kneu is built to support. Our platform captures objective, longitudinal, multimodal data from patients between clinical appointments, turning everyday smartphones into clinically validated measurement tools. Cognition, motor function, speech, mood and activity are tracked continuously rather than as a one-off sample at a clinic visit every six months.

For a treatment like subcutaneous lecanemab, this changes what clinical teams can see and act on, for example:

• Assessing whether a patient is responding to treatment as expected;

• Understanding how the disease is progressing, through objective measurements; 

• Highlighting early signals of side effects or cognitive change quickly.

This provides a joined-up picture of at-home treatment that no single clinic visit or health record system can easily produce.

In addition to the measurement data, Kneu provides support, information and reminders for patients and caregivers. Our nurse-led remote service provides patients and their clinical teams with an extra layer of reassurance.

The result is a model where home administration and clinical oversight work together, where patients gain independence and health systems gain the capacity to extend this treatment to more people, safely. It's a direction the Alzheimer's Association has pointed to as well, noting that at-home administration aims to be less burdensome and easier for patients and care partners to sustain over the long term.

The road ahead

The subcutaneous starting dose is expected to become available in the US later this summer and the conversation will move quickly from can this be done at home to how can we do it well.

That's a conversation we're ready for at Kneu. Better neurology care is here, and increasingly, it's happening where people live.

If you're thinking about how to make home-based Alzheimer's treatment work at scale, we'd welcome the conversation. Contact us today.