January 9, 2017

New York announced that it has filed a lawsuit against dietary supplement maker Quincy Bioscience, LLC and related companies and executives, charging that they deceptively market the widely-sold supplement Prevagen by falsely claiming that the product improves memory, despite lacking reliable scientific evidence to support this claim. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks a ban on further false claims about Prevagen, restitution for consumers, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and civil penalties for violations of state law. According to the complaint, Quincy Bioscience’s own research demonstrates the flawed science behind its claims that Prevagen can improve memory. Quincy Bioscience developed and marketed Prevagen on the theory that its active ingredient, apoaequorin, a dietary protein, enters the human brain to supplement proteins that are lost during the natural aging process. Yet Quincy Bioscience lacks any studies showing that this orally-administered protein can cross the human blood brain barrier, and in fact, Quincy’s own studies show that the protein is rapidly digested in the stomach and broken down into amino acids like any other dietary protein. NY