The Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General have filed a suit against Quincy Bioscience LLC, which makes the memory supplement Prevagen, alleging that there is no proof the supplement works.
The medicine, which costs $24 to $68 for 30 pills, is advertised on cable and broadcast television, according to the FTC, which is seeking refunds for customers who bought Prevagen. The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that Quincy Bioscience had sold some $165 million worth of Prevagen between 2007 and mid-2015, according to court filings. It says that Quincy Bioscience based much of its advertising for Prevagen on a single study, called the Madison Memory Study, which gave the drug or a placebo to 218 people and then had them perform certain tasks on a computer.“The Madison Memory Study failed to show a statistically significant improvement in the treatment group over the placebo group on any of the nine computerized cognitive tasks,” the lawsuit said.
Jeffrey Newman represents whistleblowers.
