Our product offers a unique blend of all-natural ingredients to target multiple aspects of dementia pathology

Clinically relevant doses of medically active compounds

Packed into an easy delivery system of delicious treats. No pills, measuring doses or sourcing multiple ingredients! Just enjoy the great taste!

Developed by neuroscientists

The Stats on Dementia

* Figure adapted from: https://www.sci.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Dementia-affects-more-women.png

Currently there are no clinical or pharmaceutical cures for dementia – patients are provided with symptom modifying treatments which often have major side-effects and may become less effective over time.

So what can be done to fight this global health crisis?

The answer may lie in the combination of Nature and Science

Nutraceutical compounds, such as curcumin (from the spice turmeric), EGCG (green tea extract), hops (yes, the stuff in beer!) and resveratrol (the stuff in red wine!), to name a few, have been recognized for their promising medicinal properties as potential treatments for many health conditions, including dementia.

Do they actually work? The answer is not a simple YES, but according to pre-clinical and clinical research, they can work, under the correct conditions.

The Science

As a neuroscientist, I specialize in research on dementias (aka, neurodegenerative diseases). Together with my husband, Dr. Haydn Allbutt, we have been investigating polyphenols (that’s the technical name for compounds such as curcumin, etc) in our lab for over a decade. Here is what we learned, both from experiments in our lab and reviewing the vast amount of published literature on the benefits and challenges of polyphenol-based medicine:

Disease Pathology

• Amyloid protein aggregation – One of the primary pathologies common to all neurodegenerative diseases is aggregation of specific proteins. These proteins all belong to a larger family known as amyloid proteins.
• Brain toxicity – These protein aggregates become biologically toxic in the brain and interfere with normal cell function.
• Cell death – The pathology becomes a cascade of inflammatory processes and deficits in cellular energy, ultimately leading to cell death.
• Gut disturbance – Growing evidence suggests gut health is essential for a healthy brain and the processes causing brain disease may originate in the gut.

Treatment Challenges

• Bio-availability of compounds – Studies show polyphenols are poorly absorbed by the body. This has been a major barrier to clinical applications.
• Blood-brain barrier (BBB) – This is a protective layer of cells around the brain that regulates the entry of substances into the brain. One of the biggest challenges in developing medicine for the brain is to get the medicine past the BBB.
• Targeting multiple aspects of the disease – Current treatment methods focus on specific aspects of the disease rather than the entire pathology, resulting in limited success.

The Ingredients

We include ingredients with a range of properties to give our products the functional benefits we need including the ability to:

• Target amyloid protein aggregation – Unique blend of polyphenols to give a synergistic effect to de-aggregate amyloid proteins. This may help prevent, slow down or stop the disease process. 
• Improve bioavailability and pass the BBB – Lipid (oil) based delivery system, preserving the active compounds through the digestive process and allowing entry past the BBB into the brain.
• Target disease pathology from multiple angles – Ingredients to target the inflammatory, nutritional and gut health complications associated with the diseases.
• Known dosage of active compounds – All ingredients sourced for maximum purity, so that known concentrations of the active compounds are provided. Doses based on clinical research.
• Easy delivery – Consuming the diverse list of ingredients individually, especially at the necessary concentrations, would be impossible. That is why we developed a method for incorporating these natural medicinal compounds into an easy delivery system in the form of snacks or treats. 
  

Our Story and Inspiration for Synergy Functional Foods 

The inspiration for this project has been the culmination of decades of research into neurodegenerative diseases and unfortunately in my case, a family history of dementia, including a recent diagnosis for one of the most special people in my life (will maintain anonymity for privacy reasons). As most people, I went through an initial grieving process after such news (although it was not a huge surprise at that stage) and felt helpless. There are no cures and I know first hand how horrible this journey will be! My family has lived through it before, I read about it every day in my work, I look at the brains of deceased patients to try and learn about the disease and how we can tackle it.

Then, in discussions with Haydn about everything we know regarding dementia, and the work we have been doing with polyphenols, I realized we are not helpless! The answer may be right in front of our eyes! Between our research and the vast amount of published literature, including clinical studies, the pieces of the puzzle are there and require assembly. So, together, we set out to develop Synergy Functional Foods.

First, we devised a plan for targeting disease pathology, rather than symptoms, from multiple angles. This involved methods for de-aggregation of amyloid proteins as well as supporting function of a struggling brain and body. Then, the complication of delivering this multi-component treatment plan to patients had to be resolved. Delivery via pills would be impractical as a large number of pills would be required and compliance with taking the pills could be minimal (as evidenced by personal experience). The bitter taste of many of these compounds would also pose a problem. However, Haydn loves to bake and this forged an idea – develop a recipe for combining all the active ingredients to fight dementia into a food-based delivery system!

We believe our product combines the best of nature, medicine and patient care so families can have less of:

And more of:

Now we are asking for your support

We want to develop this therapy further and offer it to the 50 million people suffering dementia and their families worldwide. To put the research progress in perspective, other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease was first described over 200 years ago, Alzheimer’s disease was described over 100 years ago. The medical community has certainly learned a great deal about neurodegenerative diseases since then yet there are still no clinical cures available. Pre-clinical research has demonstrated that the powerful medicinal properties of plant-based polyphenolic compounds may offer hope for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Furthermore, these compounds are relatively inexpensive, particularly when compared to synthetic pharmaceuticals, and are considered generally safe. Many people already rely on different forms of such treatments for a variety of conditions and to maintain overall health. Synergy Functional Foods would provide known dosages of these compounds in a scientifically relevant and consumer-friendly delivery system.

The next step in our development process is to engage expert consultants to guide us through the extensive legal and regulatory environment needed to produce, market and deliver Synergy Functional Foods. We have been investigating companies that specialize in these complex procedures and can help guide us through the process of taking our idea from bench to production. The current crowd-sourcing proposal is for the funding necessary to receive initial consultations and direct us further through the process. 

Our ultimate goal is to make Synergy Functional Foods available worldwide at an affordable cost as well as provide funding for further dementia-related research. Therefore, a portion of proceeds from all sales will go directly back into research funding for neurodegenerative diseases. This scheme of “crowd-funded” science places the direction of research into the hands of the public rather than government or pharmaceutical companies and may yield faster, more efficient and more successful outcomes.

We also intend to develop an app, purely optional, free and available to anyone, which will allow recording of anonymous data to track progression of their disease in response to any treatments taken, whether it be our nutraceutical supplements, or existing pharmacological or behavioral therapies, or any combination thereof. This format of “citizen science” has potential to provide very large and longitudinal study datasets that may supersede the capabilities of expensive clinical trials. We believe this data may be a powerful tool for dementia research and continued development of therapies to combat such diseases.

Dementia is not part of normal aging and we need to find solutions to this growing health crisis. Many of you reading this may now be thinking of the loved ones in your family or a friend’s family or someone else you know who has Alzheimer’s disease or Frontotemporal dementia. In my case, the family history of dementia was partially the driving force for career directions and development of Synergy Functional Foods was inspired by the most recent diagnosis in my family. Now, the aim is to push dementia research and treatment to the point of concrete answers and cures, for the sake of mine, yours and everyone else’s families.

If you would like to help with providing potential treatment options and hope for those affected by neurodegenerative diseases, please consider supporting our project.

Thank you for reading and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

Dr. Tala Allbutt (PhD) and Dr. Haydn Allbutt (PhD)