Michael Gaffney - No more common cold; maybe
A cure for the common cold?
According to George A. Eby III of Austin, that's exactly what he has uncovered.
He holds a U.S. patent, issued last April, on his zinc ion lozenge formula, and Eby's patent is titled "A Cure for the Common Cold.''
However, The patent titles are used to facilitate searching, "they're not part of the actual legal patent,'' said Lisa-Joy Zgorski, spokeswoman for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "What's protected is the (lozenge) composition as part of a treatment to cure the common cold.''
Zinc has been used in a variety of cold treatments for decades. But Eby found a formula for a palatable oral lozenge designed to deliver zinc to the sinus and throat.
Basically, to receive a U.S. patent, an inventor must have an idea or invention that is "novel; non-obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art; ground-breaking; and it has to be useful, produce something or accomplish something it sets out to do,'' Zgorski said.
Remember, Eby's patent includes the claim "cure for the common cold.''
An unlikely researcher
Eby is an unlikely biomedical researcher. He holds a master's degree in city planning, and bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics. Hardly the background for medical research.
But his 3-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in 1979. Eby was giving the girl high doses of vitamins and minerals in hopes of improving her health, and serendipity led him to his now-patented zinc treatment.
Sometime during the girl's chemotherapy regimen, she caught a cold. Despite her weakened immune system, after falling asleep with a 50 milligram zinc tablet in her mouth, the girl awoke the next day free of cold symptoms, Eby said. "Her cold was just gone.''
That incident launched Eby on a multi-year investigation into zinc, an essential element for human health. His journey ended with the development of the zinc lozenge.
But a cure for the common cold?
"I think the way it works is that it stabilizes the cell membranes and makes them immune to viruses,'' Eby said. "It's kind of a little repair kit; the body's repair kit.''
He added, "I don't know why no one figured out that (zinc) lozenges work,'' but nobody did.
Eby has sold licensing rights to manufacture his formula to three different companies, including the Weider Nutrition Group of Salt Lake City, which recently began selling the product they named Cold-Free, a lozenge based on Eby's formula.
Luke R. Bucci,cq vice president of Research for Weider, said that the company makes no claims about the zinc lozenge, marketing the product as a nutritional supplement, but he added, "I've tried it myself. I contracted the flu accompanied with some nasal congestion and in two days I was back to normal.''
The right zinc lozenge
But zinc is a common element available to anyone, so why pay Eby a royalty for his formula?
"There's a wrong way and a right way to make zinc lozenges,'' Bucci said. "We wanted to duplicate exactly what George Eby said was the way to make a zinc lozenge, which we did.''
It was fortuitous for the company that drug manufacturers passed on Eby's offer to license the product, he said.
"The drug companies had their chance and they refused it,'' Bucci said, adding, "It would kill very large incomes from cold remedies that don't attack the cold, so they didn't want to sacrifice the market. That's my personal viewpoint.''
The FDA holds that any product making a claim of treating or curing a disease is a drug, "so therefore we are simply providing Cold-Free as a vitamin supplement without saying what it does,'' Bucci said. "We do not have literature that says it cures the common cold because we want to remain within the guidelines.''
The Food and Drug Administration is unaware of Eby's cold-cure claim, said Arthur Whitmore, FDA spokesman.
"We haven't received any marketing application for zinc (used for) the common cold, and don't have any determination on its effectiveness,'' Whitmore said.
(Michael Gaffney is medical writer for The Avalanche-Journal.) |
