AmideBio shares Alzheimer’s products

LOUISVILLE – AmideBio LLC has started distributing its products used in Alzheimer’s research for free to universities and pharmaceutical companies across the country.

The Louisville-based biotech company is offering the trademarked BioPure amyloid products free to researchers with established Alzheimer’s research programs as an introductory promotion that ends Sept. 1, said Misha Plam, AmideBio’s president and chief executive.

AmideBio also is selling the products on its website, www.amidebio.com, in various quantities, with prices starting at $60 for the smallest quantities of its product available. The peptide research products were discovered at the University of Colorado Boulder and were licensed from the university’s technology transfer office for an undisclosed sum in 2011.

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Plam said that AmideBio’s amyloid products are 99 percent pure, biological products, while others in use are synthetic – and have about 97 percent purity. The difference in purity has cost the drug development community hundreds of millions of dollars as researchers try to find ways to treat Alzheimer’s, Plam said.

“When you try to develop a drug, the (amyloid) impurities (hurt) the ability to make a proper drug,” Plam said.

AmideBio expects the new amyloid products to do well, in part, following the $100 million BRAIN, or Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, Initiative announced recently by President Barack Obama. The research effort in the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget would be supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Science Foundation.

In addition, about 50 universities around the country already have research grants from the federal National Institutes of Health to conduct Alzheimer’s research that could benefit from the product, Plam said. Pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) based in Indianapolis have been involved in a variety of clinical trials for Alzheimer’s-related drugs.

AmideBio has future plans to make and possibly sell Alzheimer’s diagnostic test kits that consumers could use, said Michael Stowell, the company’s chief scientific officer.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia in the United States, and the fifth-leading cause of death for those aged 65 and older. An estimated 5.3 million Americans of all ages have some form of the disease, which typically begins with gradual memory loss.