We do not yet have the technology to cure Alzheimer's disease, according to an investor in the health sector

Biotech companies do not yet have the technology or understanding of Alzheimer's disease to find a cure for the disease that plagues nearly 5.8 million people in the United States, said Tuesday Jorge Conde, partner of Andreessen Horowitz at the CNBC Healthy Returns conference in New York.

"One of the things we look for when we invest, we talked earlier about binary risk, is when you develop a new treatment, you have to understand what the disease is doing," he said. he declares. "You must understand what you need to affect the disease process, and then you must have the ability to actually make that molecule, that cell, or that gene."

With Alzheimer's "we do not even really know the first layer, so the likelihood of finding the right target and touching it will be unlikely, unless we can have this first level of understanding of the disease," he said. .

Biogen recently joined a long list of companies from the last decade who have failed to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Earlier this year, he discontinued the clinical trial of aducanumab, an Alzheimer's drug that he was developing in partnership with the Japanese pharmaceutical group Eisai.

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive and debilitating disease that often affects a person's memory, thinking and behavior.

Alzheimer's is "very, very difficult to solve, and it will require new technology to do it, and I do not think we have the technology," Conde said.