Tens of billions of dollars have been spent on Alzheimer’s research, with tragically little to show for it. It seems nearly every study concludes with an announcement that “more research is needed,” resulting in a self-perpetuating research industry in which little hope is found.
“Every new drug developed to address Alzheimer’s seems to focus on narrow therapeutic targets and minute statistical manipulation to gain FDA approval to go to market, which invariably ends in one failed drug after another,” shares Gloria Simpson, Chief Nursing Ops for The Young Blood Institute. “Yet, practical alternatives have been ignored.”
Simpson has over 25 years of nursing experience, specializing in apheresis procedures. She also has a personal interest in Alzheimer’s. As both a daughter and a niece of people with Alzheimer’s, she has seen firsthand the impact of the horrible disease.
“I’ve been to a few Alzheimer’s conferences, and it seems a fact that endless research has failed to this point,” Simpson laments. “Many decades and tens of billions of dollars later, the path conventional medicine has chosen to pursue has yet to bring us to a place where people can experience healing and relief from the effects of Alzheimer’s.”
Finding hope in therapeutic plasma exchange
Simpson’s journey to find an effective approach to Alzheimer’s treatment led her to play a vital role in a study that explored the potential of therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE).
“I personally led a small team of apheresis nurses in a study conducted in Florida that tested the effects of TPE in 200 moderate-stage Alzheimer’s subjects over a four-year period from 2014–2018,” Simpson shares. “Grifols (NASDAQ: GRFS) of Spain sponsored the study, calling it AMBAR, or Alzheimer’s Management By Albumin Replacement. At the same time, my team was carrying out the study in Florida, and Grifols was conducting a sister study in Barcelona, Spain, which involved an additional 300 subjects.”
The results of the AMBAR study were remarkable. It reported a 61 percent success rate in stopping the progression of Alzheimer’s.
“I personally witnessed patients, specifically those in the ‘good’ control arm of the study, actually recover their memories,” Simpson shares. “I saw an orchard farmer who couldn’t tell a lemon from a lime regain his cognitive function and begin to teach me about different fruit species and how to fertilize and grow crops. I saw a non-communicative former Spanish dancer regain her memory and motivation and begin dancing again. She got her groove back and even started flirting with the doctors. I saw another man who replied to every question with, ‘Ask my wife’ begin telling me stories about his kids, grandkids, and nephews — by name. How many researchers in the Alzheimer’s field have ever seen patients actually recover their memories?”
Is the simplicity of TPE causing modern medicine to reject it?
What makes Simpson’s success even more remarkable is the relatively simple process that fueled it. TPE is not a cutting-edge new technology but a process that has been used to treat various conditions for decades.
“I have personally conducted over 10,000 TPE procedures in my 30-year career,” Simpson shares. “It’s not a sexy new drug, but a relatively well-established therapy. So it may not capture the interest of researchers interested in new career-defining discoveries.”
Yet this simple, decades-old procedure seems to be at the forefront of today’s effort to offer help to people living with Alzheimer’s. In Spain, TPE has been commercialized for Alzheimer’s patients at the Ace Alzheimer’s Center in Barcelona.
“I recently met with the founder of the Ace Alzheimer Center and the principal investigator for the AMBAR study, Merce Boada,” Simpson reports. “She’s one of the only people I’ve met, other than my nursing colleagues from the AMBAR study, who has seen Alzheimer’s patients actually recover their memory.”
Currently, Simpson is leveraging the power of TPE to help patients at the Young Blood Institute. She joined the institute’s team in 2018, shortly after completing the AMBAR study. The pre-clinical studies she has been a part of the institute suggest the same type of treatment potential she saw in the AMBAR study.
“We’ve discovered that TPE appears to lower or clear Aβ levels in cognitively normal subjects based on blood tests from Shimadzu Amyloid testing service,” Simpson says. “This means we might be able to use plasma exchange to prevent Alzheimer’s disease by nipping Aβ in the bud before it has a chance to develop and entomb the brain with the fibrils that destroy neurons, brain cells, and, ultimately, memory.”
While the results offered by TPE may not qualify it as a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, studies to date indicate it can be a practical alternative for people with Alzheimer’s until research arrives at a cure. It is a safe and effective therapy that is breaking barriers in Alzheimer’s treatment by delivering groundbreaking results.
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