Failed drug now sold as natural-health remedy

What’s a company to do when it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on an Alzheimer’s drug, only for it to fail when tested in Phase 3 trials?

One option, it seems, is to turn the medicine into a natural-health remedy, and avoid having to prove it alleviates patient symptoms. That’s what a Montreal pharmaceutical company did after the failure of its drug Alzhemed in 2007 clinical trials.

Changing the trade name of the substance to Vivimind, it won ap- proval from Health Canada as a natural-health product in 2010, and has since been selling it here and in other countries as a memory protector. The active ingredient, homotaurine, is found in some seaweed, but Vivimind itself is synthetic.

The government licence for the product says studies suggest it may help support the brain’s hippocampus. Patients taking it in the trials did experience less of the trademark hippocampus shrinkage that’s typical of Alzheimer’s disease.

But, the official listing adds: “This product is not intended to treat, prevent or reduce the risk of any specific diseases.”

Francesco Bellini, whose former company, Neurochem Inc., developed Alzhemed and who is chairman of the firm selling Vivimind, says he believes it works, and takes the supplement daily himself. Others are not so sure. “Vivimind is available in Canada only because of a lax regulatory framework that has allowed an ineffective prescription drug to be rebranded and marketed as a natural health product,” pharmacist Scott Gavura wrote on his Science-Based Pharmacy blog.