Prometheus 6   

Race Is On for a Pill to Save the Memory
By DAVID TULLER

hey are called smart pills or brain boosters or, to use the preferred pharmaceutical term, cognitive enhancers.

But whatever the name given to compounds created to prevent or treat memory loss, drug companies and supplement producers — eager to meet the demands of a rapidly growing market — are scrambling to exploit what they view as an enormous medical and economic opportunity.

Three drugs being prescribed for Alzheimer's disease — donepezil (Aricept), galantamine (Reminyl) and rivastigmine (Exelon) — have been shown to delay somewhat the loss of mental abilities in people with the illness. So has the drug memantine, which has been used for years in Europe but has not been approved in the United States. Some experts also say that performing mental exercises and adding fish oil to the diet can delay memory decline.

Pharmaceutical companies are investigating dozens of other compounds to see whether they can help people who have memory difficulties but have not progressed to Alzheimer's. Some researchers hope that drugs will eventually prevent the deficits that even healthy elderly people experience.

Much of the excitement among pharmaceutical companies, which have dozens of drugs in development, stems from advances in clarifying some of the brain processes and biochemical pathways that can hinder or help memory storage and retrieval, said Dr. Paul R. Solomon, a professor of psychology at Williams College.

"The basic research into the causes of memory disorders is going very rapidly," said Dr. Solomon, who is also co-director of the Memory Clinic at the Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington.

But it will probably be at least five years before any of those drugs meet the standards for approval by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers said.