Cuban Medication Offers Hope for Millions, U.S. Policy Blinds Us - Dr Bill Blanchet

“NeuralCIM is so effective as a new drug, this should change the narrative.”

Colorado-based physician Dr Bill Blanchet has spent years researching Cuba’s biopharmaceutical industry. He says its latest product, NeuralCIM, a breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, could change the lives of millions of people in the United States, but is blocked by the same embargo that is claiming Cuban lives.

Over the past year, 52 of Dr Blanchet’s patients have gone through La Pradera International Clinic in Havana to receive the treatment, and he’s been monitoring their progress. The drug was approved by Cuba’s Ministry of Health in 2025 for the treatment of mild to moderate Alzheimer’s, free for Cuban citizens.

In this interview, Dr Blanchet explains the science behind the medication, how it was trialed, its potential in helping with Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injuries, and his outrage at how U.S. foreign policy is punishing ordinary Cubans and crippling Cuba’s healthcare system.

Watch our report on NeuralCIM here. An upcoming Belly of the Beast documentary, Teresita’s Dream, tracks the research and development of NeuralCIM. It meets the Cuban scientists behind it, focusing on Dr Teresita Rodríguez, who was driven by her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s.

Watch the trailer here: https://youtu.be/a2Y5FBR0pnU

Help shift the conversation on Alzheimer’s - for press inquiries or to host an early screening of the film.

TRANSCRIPT
Dr Bill Blanchet, Boulder Internal Medicine

NeuralCIM, or NeuroEPO Plus, is a medication that's derived from Erythropoietin. Erythropoietin is a substance made by our kidneys that tells our bodies to make more red blood cells.. It's also produced by neurons in our brain, by the astrocytes. And when our brain is injured, the NeuroEPO helps the brain heal, stimulates production of brain growth factor, reduces inflammation in the brain, prolongs the life expectancy of old brain cells and actually induces production of new brain cells.

So it hits all the points. And so it's truly a breakthrough.

And when you look at degenerative neurological diseases or neurologic injury, it has the potential of being a massive pharmacologic improvement over what we have.

Hassan Ghani, Belly of the Beast

The substance (Erythropoietin) that you said is present in the brain already, is it the absence of this causing the issues? Normally, would a healthy person produce more of this?

Dr Blanchet

In some pathologic conditions the brain doesn't have enough of it. In some pathologic conditions the brain has plenty but more will help. And so it's both. So in the circumstance of Cerebellar Ataxia, it's been shown that the brain lacks Erythropoietin. But with traumatic brain injury the brain actually gets a little boost with Erythropoietin.

If you give them a big boost it has a tremendous additional benefit. So in both circumstances.

Hassan

If someone's on the drug for a year or two, do they need to keep taking this drug for the rest of their lives, or can you stop at some point once the cognition has returned?

Dr Blanchet

Well, in the circumstance of dementia, you keep taking it. In the Cuban studies, they've shown when they took the drug for a year, got an improvement, then stopped the drug, they started losing the benefit. Restarted the drug, they gained the benefit again. So with Alzheimer's, you're dealing with a progressive degenerative disease. And so you have to constantly push back against a progressive degenerative disease.

With other diseases such as traumatic brain injury, a finite duration of treatment helps correct the problem, and you can stop and get a good result. And in animal models that has been shown to be very effective. In human models, the study is still in the Phase III trial and we don't have the data yet, but I'm fully expecting that we'll find in the traumatic brain injury world, there's a finite duration of treatment, and then you're back to where you need to be.

For Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and in Multiple Sclerosis, assuming we get the indication for those diseases, it will probably be a lifetime treatment. But, my God, compared to the disease, putting some nose drops in your nose three times a week… It's absolutely worth it.

Hassan

I wanted to ask you about the trials in Cuba, how comprehensive were they? And when was this drug approved?

Dr Blanchet

The first trial they did with this particular drug is called the ATHENEA trial. You can actually find it in the NIH website in the US.

The ATHENEA trial had 170 patients. Two thirds of them were on the drug. One third was on placebo, just saltwater in their nose. At the end of the first year, 85% of the people on placebo had progression of dementia, 54% of the people on treatment had improvement in their dementia and 30% were stable, so 84% had improvement or stability of their dementia at one year.

At the end of the first year, they unblinded the study, so it lost some scientific rigor at that point in time. But they continued to follow a group of patients on the drug, and a group of patients off the drug. By the end of three years, of the group of patients off the drug, 98% had progression of their dementia. And the group of patients on the drug - everyone who was stable or improved at one year was still stable or improved at three years. That's incredible.

Even more incredible was that at the end of one year, the difference between the treatment and the placebo group was 9 points on a 70 point cognitive cognitive scale, with 4% improvement in the treatment group and 5% loss in the placebo group.

By three years, that number was 27 points on a 70 point cognitive scale, with the treatment group going from a 4 point improvement to a 10 point improvement, and the placebo group going from a 5 point loss to a 17 point loss. 27 points on a 70 point cognitive scale is just incredible. It's earth shaking.

And so I have every reason to believe the ATHENEA trial, because I know these researchers. I know they do good work. Then they were involved in a second Phase III trial where they were intending to enroll 616 patients, a larger trial. But as they were evaluating the ATHENEA trial, they decided to look at the first year's results (of the second trial) on the number of people who’d done one year.

So, as a subset of the second trial, they looked at 289 patients and found very, very similar results to the ATHENEA trial. At that point in time the Ministry of Health decided the benefit of this drug is so dramatic, let's give it early approval. So they gave it early approval in March of 2025.

And Cuba does international healthcare. So if you are non-Cuban and you want to benefit from Cuba's biomedical research, you can come to Cuba, go to La Pradera International Clinic and get placed on the drug. I have 52 patients who have done exactly that. And of the 52 patients on this drug, I am seeing with my own eyes, in my own clinic, ongoing improvement in these patients that is just inspiring.

A dear friend of mine, has been a friend for almost 40 years, developed moderately advanced dementia. It wasn't quite advanced, but she was at the point where she could not name her grandchildren. She could not tell me what day of the week it was, what day of the month it was, what month or what year it was. She could not tell me what she had for breakfast that morning. And that had been a problem for months and months.

She gets started on the drug. Six months later, she's able to tell me what she had for breakfast. She's able to name her grandchildren by children. She told me the day of the week, the day of the month. She missed the year by one year, but she used to miss the year by a few decades, by a millennium. She was in the 1900s.

So then a week or two later, I talked to her daughter and said, ‘So how's your mom doing?’ And her response was, “Oh my God, she's so good.” See, before she started on these drops, one of her grandchildren got married. At the wedding, she was just a bump on the log. Recently, another grandchild got married and she was the life of the party. She’s out dancing, she’s socializing, she’s her old self again. And so it's brought her back among the living, which is huge.

Hassan

People who are caring  for people with the disease, or their loved ones, will see the difference. Do people who are going through it themselves, do they feel a major difference themselves?

Dr Blanchet

Well, some of the people do. But the problem with dementia is your meter for telling you you're having dementia, and your cognitive function tend to decline at the same speed. So most people with dementia don't notice they're losing anything. Consequently, when they regain it, they don't notice they're gaining anything. So I'm not getting that kind of feedback from the patients as much as I'm getting it from the caregivers and the patient's family.

And then when we do cognitive assessments, we're seeing it on the cognitive assessment objectively.

Hassan

So you've been assessing people at multiple stages?

Dr Blanchet

So we are not doing a study on these patients. These are patients who are going to Cuba, being prescribed the drug in Cuba. But we are following them very closely. So before they get on the drug, we do a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). We also do an auditory evoked response (EEG), which measures speed and function of different activities in the brain.

And what we're seeing is patients are improving on both of those metrics, which is interesting because in the ATHENEA trial, that improvement did not reach statistical significance till 11 months. We are seeing some improvement at 6 months.

Hassan

Why do you think that is?

Dr Blanchet

I think it's possible, if not probable, that in ATHENEA they had a slightly worse level of dementia when they started. In my practice, I have a highly educated population, and when they go just a little bit down the scale, they notice it or their families notice it, and we get them started sooner.

And talking with Doctor Sosa, the observation is if you start this early in dementia, a lot of patients come back to normal and get back to functioning normal. So it's not just that they slow the progression, they actually come back and function normally again.

Hassan

So the stage at which you intervene makes a big difference?

Dr Blanchet

In fact in Cuba the drug is indicated for mild to moderate dementia. When you get to the severe dementia stage, where you can't feed yourself and can't toilet yourself, they feel that that's not the time to start the drug because stability or some improvement there is not really a benefit.

Hassan

The existing treatments out there, what do they offer in comparison?

Dr Blanchet

The newer drugs we have in the United States are antibodies against beta amyloid, and they do a great job of taking beta amyloid out of the brain. But no one is stable and no one is improved. They just take the slope of progression and make it less steep.

Not without value, but compared to a medication that improved 54% of the subjects and stabilized 30%, there's miles of difference between these two drugs.

Making this drug available for the rest of the world is a mandate. It's not a wish, we have to. It will change the world.

Hassan

How is it possible that a country under sanctions like Cuba has managed to come up with a solution to a problem that no European nation, no U.S. pharmaceutical company has been able to do?

Dr Blanchet

Cuba has been doing biopharmaceutical research for 30 years. About 30 years ago, Castro decided to invest in biopharmaceutical research. Turned out it was brilliant because biopharmaceuticals have become a major export item for Cuba. And it’s been profitable, and it’s been self-funding.

The embargo has not made things easy. They can't buy equipment that was made in the United States. And so I've talked to some of my friends in the research into this. They will have products they need to test. They will have to fly to Europe with test tubes, run the tests in Europe, and bring the results back, because the embargo prevents them from getting the equipment in the United States.

The other thing the embargo does is it makes it difficult for them to get some of the raw ingredients to manufacture. And so right now, Cuba is manufacturing NeuralCIM for their population and for people who are coming in to La Pradera. But they're limited in the amount they can manufacture because they're limited in getting the raw ingredients.

And so, they have a thousand or so people in Cuba on this medication. We have 7 million people in the United States who need to be on this medication. And so it's tragic that the embargo is reducing our ability to utilize Cuba's technology to benefit from this drug.

But when you look at Cuba's biopharmaceutical industry, it's truly amazing. They have antibodies to treat cancer that they've been using for 10 or 15 years. They were using immunotherapy for cancer before we were in the United States. They've been doing their own vaccines for over 20 years. They've been making other biopharmaceuticals, their own Erythropoietin, for over 20 years. They have a drug for patients with diabetic leg ulcers, who have a very high incidence of amputation.

Their drug, the so-called Heberprot-P, reduces the need for amputation by 72%. So in the United States, we cut off the legs. In Cuba, they give them a drug and don't cut off their legs.

I wrote a little, yet to be published, op-ed that says ‘Americans are dying to maintain the embargo with Cuba.’ That's absolutely the case. And my first example is the patient who taught me about Cuba's biopharmaceuticals. His name was George.

George had stage-four lung cancer. And George comes into my office and says, “Bill, I want to go to Cuba to get immunotherapy for my lung cancer.” At that point in time, I had not heard of Cuba since elementary school. And I thought that was crazy, but I support my patients.

I said, “Look, George, if you want immunotherapy for your lung cancer, do it now while you still have an immune system. If you want to go to Cuba to get immunotherapy, I'll go with you. Because if it's real, I need to know about it. And if it's crazy,” which I thought it was, “you need to know about it. If we go together, we’ll figure this out.”

In October 2017, we come down to Havana, go to La Pradera International Clinic. He gets started on a monoclonal antibody for his lung cancer. 9 months later, he had no lung cancer. It was completely in remission, gone, without any significant side effects in the treatment. He continued to work full time. He ran the BOLDERBoulder 5k race.

He functioned on a very high level. And then after being on the drug for a year and a half, Washington, D.C. increased the embargo to Cuba. And George lost access to the drug.

Without access to the drug, his cancer came back and he went through 3 rounds of chemotherapy. The chemotherapy just made him sick, as he was anticipating. And a year and a half later, George was gone.

And so when I say Americans are dying to maintain the embargo, George is the first person I know who absolutely died as a consequence of the embargo.

So, if this drug, if NeuroEPO were available in the United States today, we could prevent 600,000 Americans from becoming dysfunctional from dementia every year. As we do that, the cost savings of the healthcare system would exceed $300bn a year. In 15 years, it will save over $700bn a year in healthcare costs.

I've seen what it's done in Cuba, I've interviewed Doctor Sosa who is the principal investigator in the ATHENEA trial. And the enthusiasm of Doctor Sosa and all of her staff about this medicine, the way I put it: I can write a study and make up numbers. I can make up statistics. I can't make up the enthusiasm that the maintenance people have in the clinic about what they're seeing with this drug. Seeing patients get better, coming back to life with this drug is just… to talk about it without crying is almost difficult.

Hassan

Have there been any major side effects?

Dr Blanchet

Of the thousand patients in Cuba who are taking this drug, in no patient, not once has a drug been stopped because of a side effect. In some of the early research, they had two patients whose liver function tests transiently got worse. Continuing the drug, they came back to normal.

You had two patients whose red [blood cell] counts transiently went up, continuing the drug, came back to normal. So very trivial side effects. And they look so diligently for side effects. With the ATHENEA trial, they've given me access to the ATHENEA trial and their analysis, 166 page analysis of the ATHENEA trial. And everything, every box is checked, everything is looked at.

And the more I read, the more amazed I was. Not only by the quality of this drug, but by the depth of the research into this drug.

Hassan

Traumatic brain injuries as well, it can help with potentially?

Dr Blanchet

In animal studies it was incredibly effective in traumatic brain injuries. A short course of the drug was tremendously effective in traumatic brain injuries. They're currently doing a Phase III trial on traumatic brain injury. We don't know the results of the human Phase III trial yet. We should know soon.

I have a patient who, part of his dementia, was a traumatic brain injury. And in that patient, I am seeing significant improvements at several levels. His ability to function later in the day, his balance. He used to fall 2 or 3 times per week, and he hasn't fallen in 6 months. So his ability to communicate has improved. His ability to write a book is improved. And so it makes a difference in my one patient with traumatic brain injury. I don't want to call that a study. But we're studying them. We're looking at them. The potential is huge.

Post-stroke - I have patients post-stroke who are having improvement in their balance and their gait, post-stroke.

Patients with Parkinson's disease, I'm seeing a benefit. Patients with Parkinson's disease with something called autonomic dysfunction, where their blood pressure is just wildly disparate. Three months on the drug, their blood pressure's back and stable. And that's big.

Hassan

This almost sounds like a miracle, NeuralCIM. Why isn't this all over the media? You'd think people would be raving about it?

Dr Blanchet

So, basically, with the embargo, it's an embargo of intelligence. It's an embargo of science, an embargo of information. And we have been taught that Cuba is a backwards country with a failing economy. And that's just what we've been taught. And it's anything but a backwards country. The level of education in Cuba is immense. It's just massive. If you can find a taxi driver who doesn't have a college degree, you’ve found an exceptional taxi driver.

So, a highly educated, very smart population, whose motivation in the scientific world is to help people. And the thing that's remarkable is that there's no financial motivation. No one makes a fortune off of finding a great vaccine or finding a great drug.

People get better. And that’s the motivation, to help people get better. That's different to motivation in the United States.

And with the NeuralCIM, what's amazing is Cuba approved this early, and by approving it early, it just cost them money. It cost the government money to approve it early. Nobody made a fortune.

People got better. People went back to work. People didn't have to stay home with their grandmother who was failing. Their grandmother stopped failing. That was the pay off. Kind of a different pay off.

Hassan

50% of pharmaceuticals are produced in the US. Coming from a ‘first world nation’ to Cuba, to cure an incurable disease, do you find it ironic?

Dr Blanchet

I'm not sure ironic is the right word. Surprising, maybe, is the right word. But I've been doing this medicine thing for a long time, and I have become somewhat jaded about my opinion of major pharmaceuticals. We have a lot of drugs that are making a lot of people a lot of money and helping people a very small amount.

And because Cuba has a completely different approach to their healthcare, if they have something that doesn't help very much and costs a lot of money, they're not going to make it. If they have something that helps a lot, they're going to make it. And money is not the critical issue here. The effect that it has on the patients is the critical issue.

I was raised in capitalism. I'm a capitalist. It's a reality. But when you really look at the net benefit from some of our pharmaceuticals, like the drugs we have for dementia, very expensive, very, very small net benefit. And with the drugs we have in the United States for dementia, we will increase the costs of treating dementia. With this Cuban drug, we will dramatically decrease the cost of treating dementia. And that's a completely different mindset. We're not into decreasing cost in the United States. Just look at the cost of healthcare in the United States. It doesn't take much analysis to say, ‘Yeah, they're not about decreasing costs.’

Hassan

Given the circumstances that we're in right now, that are changing quite rapidly, is this going to have an impact on your patients and your travel here?

Dr Blanchet

My patients are concerned, because these patients have been on this drug long enough to reap benefits from the drug. And they're concerned that they may run into the same problem that George did where, because of U.S. policy, the drug becomes unavailable, and the gains that they've had over the last 6 to 9 months start diminishing. And that would be incredibly tragic.

But the other thing is, getting to know the people of Cuba, and seeing how wonderful the people of Cuba are, and seeing on a firsthand basis what our policy is doing to make these people's lives harder... to call it embarrassing doesn't begin to describe it.

I'm responsible for not having adequate incubators in the hospitals, so that babies die in a hospital, because they can't get incubators because of the embargo, or can't plug those incubators in because they don't have energy because of the embargo.

So we, as big, proud Americans are killing newborn babies in the hospital. They can't get IV fluids for the frail elderly who come down with Chikungunya or Dengue, and could easily be resuscitated with fluids, and they don't always have them. They don't always have Tylenol because of our embargo. So old people are dying who don't have to die because of our embargo.

It is so sad that we, the bright, shining city on the hill, is responsible for what we're doing in Cuba. That's tragic, really tragic.

Hassan

And it's reaching new heights as we speak. Hospitals are now cutting everything except essential surgery.

Dr Blanchet

I have a close friend who has a kidney stone, and he has diabetes, and he's had kidney infections with his kidney stone. He's at very high risk of getting another kidney infection. And if he does, it could be the last one. He was scheduled to have his stone removed. But with the embargo, with the increased embargo, they are only doing absolute emergency surgeries. Oviedo cannot get his surgery.

And so I can look at someone in the face today who is not able to get a surgery because of our embargo, he might get sick again and he might die while we're waiting for the United States to get over themselves and stop the embargo.

What is this embargo accomplishing that's helping the United States? What is the risk that Cuba poses to the United States? Objectively answer those questions. And then compare that to what the benefit would be to the United States if 600,000 Americans did not become disabled from dementia every year, and we saved $300bn a year in healthcare costs.

Which is worth more? Making life in Cuba more miserable or saving 600,000 Americans?

Think about that. Analyze that. Sleep with that. I think any rational person would say it's time to get over 1959 and join 2026. Let's do what's good for the world. Let's do what's good for America. Let's do what's good for Cuba.

NeuralCIM is so amazing as a new drug, it's so effective as a new drug, this should change the narrative. Dementia is not a Democratic disease or a Republican disease. Although, the Democrats would say it's a Republican disease, and the Republicans would say it's a Democrat disease. It's neither.

Everyone knows someone who's been touched by dementia. Everyone is part of this discussion.

I have 52 patients. I've brought many folks down here to La Pradera to get the drug. I have brought some very liberal Democrats, I have brought some very conservative Republicans. Everyone who comes back, comes back as an ambassador for Cuba.

They see what Cuban people are like. They see what we are doing to Cuba. And I don't care if you're still voting for Trump - you’ll come back from Cuba saying, ‘This embargo has got to go.’

Cuba is full of good people and this drug is an amazing thing. So, politics aside, humanity is what's at stake here.