Beijing: In a major breakthrough, China has approved a home-grown seaweed-based drug to potentially cure Alzheimer’s and it will be available to Chinese patients from next month, state media reported Monday.
China’s National Medical Products Administration has approved the market launch of the drug, ‘GV-971’, last Saturday, ‘China Daily’ reported Monday. The drug can treat mild to moderate forms of the disease and improve cognition, the report.
Patients will be able to buy the drug around China December 29 onwards, and more production lines will gradually be put into operation to satisfy the market demand, according to ‘Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceutical’, one of the drug’s developers.
The drug is the only Alzheimer’s medicine out of more than 320 developed by pharmaceutical companies around the globe to survive clinical trials, despite the investment of hundreds of billions of US dollars over the past two decades, the report said.
Extracted from brown algae, the orally taken drug is the world’s first multi-targeting and carbohydrate-based drug for Alzheimer’s, the administration informed.
The first production line for the drug, which will meet the needs of two million patients, will begin running this week.
Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible and progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory, thinking ability and the capability to carry out simple tasks, affects at least 50 million people worldwide, and the number is expected to increase as populations age.
China has roughly 10 million people with Alzheimer’s, the highest in the world.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, which jointly developed the GV-971 with Green Valley and Ocean University of China after 22 years of research, said there were previously five medicines with limited efficacy used to treat the disease, which was discovered a century ago.
A phase III clinical trial of the drug involving 818 patients completed in July last year had ‘proven to continuously and effectively improve cognition among mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease sufferers over a period of nine months,” said Geng Meiyu, lead researcher on the drug and a researcher with SIMM. “Addiction and serious toxicity of the therapy haven’t been identified in research so far,” she added.
PTI
