Money grabbing Vultures circle over Methylene Blue wonder drug

According to a comment by greygeek77 (who alas does not allow viewing of his profile and so I can't find his blog to link to it) on a previous article on the subject:

A little Googleing will show that Methylene Blue, a coal tar dye, was first synthesized in 1875, and was used by the famous French scientist, Ehrlich, in 1861, to treat pain and neuropathy because he noticed it had an affinity for neural fibers. A typical dose is 100 mg per 100Kg of body weight as a pill, or 1 to 2 mg per 100Kg as an injection.

Bulk price for MB is $42/Kg but pharm grade is now going for $285 for 250mg!! The greed has begun.

A patent was filed in 2004 for a "new" way of making the compound because MB is too old to patent itself, and hence wouldn't be profitable enough. It appears that the prescription price will be about $5/day.

This is one "drug" that the US government should nationalize in order to HELP the elderly, most of whom are on limited incomes, and to prevent their exploitation by the pharmaceuticals for unearned profit.

So the bottom line is this:

Methylene Blue has been known for 127 years to be good for neurological problems, and is cheap.

Drug companies seem to have realised this and are rushing to shore up profits by applying for new patents on an old remedy.

The price has spiked, probably due to a sudden interest. I bet that as soon as things settle down generic drug producers will be producing this stuff like it is going out of fashion.

Methylene blue: The new wonder drug?

After having published this article on Methylene blue and its affects on Alzheimer's I have been doing a bit of reading about this blue dye.

It seems that according to this article on a research paper it also repairs defective memory.

The great thing is that it is already administered as a medicine and crucially is cheap.

The interesting thing about the memory repair is that it works in a different way to the way it cures Alzheimer's in that it deals with some problems in mitochondria. You do have to wonder what its affect would be on errant proteins in cancer mitochondria as well. I suspect no one has tried this though as there will not be any money in it.

This does lead to some serious questions about how medical research and drug research is funded and what results it produces. There is no money in finding out that the cure for some ailment is something that is cheap as chips already. More on that later.

Blue dye known to cure Alzheimer's cures Alzheimer's Shocker!

There is a blue dye, methylthioninium chloride, otherwise known as the common biological staining agent and chemical indicator Methylene blue which seems to kill Alzheimer's stone dead. Well perhaps that is over egging it a bit, but it tackles the root observation of Alzheimer's which is a tangle of the tau proteins in neurons.

Apparently a researcher looking at tau proteins tried to dye them with methylene blue and found they disappeared 20 years ago.

It has taken this long, that is 100 years from finding the root pathology, and 20 years from finding a clearing agent for some research to be done.

Whilst I hail this storming success, which not only promises to halt Alzheimer's but in part reverse it, you have to ask why this research has taken so long and why it has taken a drug company to fund it? Alzheimer's is already a very expensive disease economically.

Curiously though, if the "drug" is expensive and unavailable on the NHS there may well be some jobbing chemists quite prepared to make the stuff up.

It will be cheap as chips after all.

The BBC has this, whilst the Telegraph has this.

Incidentally the Telegraph nor the BBC broadcast reports mention that it is a common chemical that has been available for years, whilst the Telegraph suggest that it may cost as much as £2.50 a day, half the price of the current non prescription curative, a pack of cigarettes. I do not know what other stiff is in "Rember" but suspect we will not find out easily. If it is just Methylene Blue, then it can be make up as a solution for little and I suspect available to even the poorest in society.