Could a seaweed-based drug offer relief from the ravages of Alzheimer’s?

Scientists in eastern China have discovered that a drug derived from seaweed can regulate bacteria in the human gut and could bring relief to patients suffering from mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

The drug, GV-971, has passed stage III clinical trials and is waiting on approval from China’s Food and Drug Administration, news website Thepaper.cn reported on Monday.

A study of 818 patients, led by Professor Geng Meiyu at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, provided the first solid evidence to link the debilitating brain condition to gut bacteria. Its findings were published on the online peer-review journal Cell Research on Friday.

Geng and her colleagues confirmed that their drug could change dominant colonies of gut bacteria in Alzheimer’s patients and reduce the release of chemicals such as phenylalanine and isoleucine that stimulate the growth and spread of inflammatory cells that give rise to the brain condition.

There are about 50 million people around the world with Alzheimer’s, and that is likely to rise to 152 million by 2050, according to the World Alzheimer Report 2018. There is no cure for the condition.

China has six million people with Alzheimer’s and about two-thirds of those were at mid-level or severely affected by the disease when diagnosed, missing the optimum intervention time, Xu Yifeng, president of the Shanghai Mental Health Centre, was quoted by Shanghai news website Eastday.com as saying.