Empowered Patient Podcast Raising Thiamine Levels in the Brain to Treat Early Alzheimer’s Disease Dr. Jose Luchsinger Benfo Team
Dr. Jose Luchsinger, Vice Chair for Clinical and Epidemiologic Research at Columbia University, is leading a phase 2 clinical trial of a prodrug Benfo that aims to raise the level of thiamine in the brain to improve memory and function in people with early Alzheimer's disease. This effort is based on research showing that Alzheimer's is associated with impaired thiamine processing in the brain, even if thiamine levels in the blood are normal. The phase 2 clinical trial for the drug is testing the ability to overcome the mishandling of thiamine in the brain by patients with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia with evidence of amyloid.
Jose explains, "So this approach is based on decades of study by Dr. Gary Gibson, who’s at the Burke Institute in New York and Cornell University in New York. What he has found, particularly in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, is that these animals have memory problems that are related to the ability to process thiamine in the brain, which is a key vitamin that is needed for proper function of the brain. The hypothesis that he came up with was that if you could somehow fix the misuse of the thiamine in the brain, that maybe you could improve memory symptoms and also functional problems in people who have Alzheimer’s disease. He tested first in animals, a prodrug called benfotiamine that after ingestion it, increases thiamine levels a hundred times in the blood. And he did observe in animals that the thiamine handling deficiency in the brain was fixed, and that memory and other characteristics in these animals improved."
"One thing that I want to explain is that we’re not saying that people with early Alzheimer’s disease have low thiamine, which is vitamin B1 in the blood. What we’re saying is that because of the Alzheimer’s disease, their brains are not handling the thiamine that there is in the blood, even if it’s at normal levels, in the correct way. What we’re doing is, and what we’re hypothesizing is that by increasing the thiamine levels a hundred times with this prodrug benfotiamine, we will overcome the mishandling of the thiamine in the brain, which has bad effects on brain metabolism and memory, etc."
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