Founder Lewis Hornby and his grandmother Pat, sampling Jelly Drops—an edible gummy containing water and life-saving electrolytes.
When Lewis Hornby visited his grandmother at her nursing home afterward, he learned that dehydration especially affects people with dementia, as they often don’t feel thirst cues at all, or may not recognize how to use cups correctly. But while dementia patients often don’t remember to drink water, it seemed to Hornby that they had less problem remembering to eat, particularly candy.
Where people with dementia often forget to drink water, they're more likely to pick up a colorful snack, Hornby found. alzheimers.org.uk
Hornby wanted to create a solution for elderly people who struggled keeping their fluid intake up. He spent the next eighteen months researching and designing a solution and securing funding for his project. In 2019, Hornby won a sizable grant from the Alzheimer’s Society, a UK-based care and research charity for people with dementia and their caregivers. Together, through the charity’s Accelerator Program, they created a bite-sized, sugar-free, edible jelly drop that looked and tasted like candy. The candy, called Jelly Drops, contained 95% water and electrolytes—important minerals that are often lost during dehydration. The final product launched in 2020—and was an immediate success. The drops were able to provide extra hydration to the elderly, as well as help keep dementia patients safe, since dehydration commonly leads to confusion, hospitalization, and sometimes even death.
Not only did Jelly Drops quickly become a favorite snack among dementia patients in the UK, but they were able to provide an additional boost of hydration to hospital workers during the pandemic. In NHS coronavirus hospital wards, patients infected with the virus were regularly given Jelly Drops to keep their fluid levels normal—and staff members snacked on them as well, since long shifts and personal protective equipment (PPE) they were required to wear often left them feeling parched.
In April 2022, Jelly Drops launched in the United States. The company continues to donate 1% of its profits to help fund Alzheimer’s research.
Sarah Watts's son Henry was born with spina bifida and can't stand or walk without assistance.
When our son Henry, now six, was diagnosed with spina bifida at his 20-week ultrasound, my husband and I were in shock. It took us more than a few minutes to understand what the doctor was telling us.
When Henry was diagnosed in 2012, postnatal surgery was still the standard of care – but that was about to change.
Neither of us had any family history of birth defects. Our fifteen-month-old daughter, June, was in perfect health.
But more than that, spina bifida – a malformation of the neural tube that eventually becomes the baby's spine – is woefully complex. The defect, the doctor explained, was essentially a hole in Henry's lower spine from which his spinal nerves were protruding – and because they were exposed to my amniotic fluid, those nerves were already permanently damaged. After birth, doctors could push the nerves back into his body and sew up the hole, but he would likely experience some level of paralysis, bladder and bowel dysfunction, and a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid that would require a surgical implant called a shunt to correct. The damage was devastating – and irreversible.
We returned home with June and spent the next few days cycling between disbelief and total despair. But within a week, the maternal-fetal medicine specialist who diagnosed Henry called us up and gave us the first real optimism we had felt in days: There was a new, experimental surgery for spina bifida that was available in just a handful of hospitals around the country. Rather than waiting until birth to repair the baby's defect, some doctors were now trying out a prenatal repair, operating on the baby via c-section, closing the defect, and then keeping the mother on strict bedrest until it was time for the baby to be delivered, just before term.
This new surgery carried risks, he told us – but if it went well, there was a chance Henry wouldn't need a shunt. And because repairing the defect during my pregnancy meant the spinal nerves were exposed for a shorter amount of time, that meant we'd be preventing nerve damage – and less nerve damage meant that there was a chance he'd be able to walk.
Did we want in? the doctor asked.
Had I known more about spina bifida and the history of its treatment, this surgery would have seemed even more miraculous. Not too long ago, the standard of care for babies born with spina bifida was to simply let them die without medical treatment. In fact, it wasn't until the early 1950s that doctors even attempted to surgically repair the baby's defect at all, instead of opting to let the more severe cases die of meningitis from their open wound. (Babies who had closed spina bifida – a spinal defect covered by skin – sometimes survived past infancy, but rarely into adulthood).
But in the 1960s and 1970s, as more doctors started repairing defects and the shunting technology improved, patients with spina bifida began to survive past infancy. When catheterization was introduced, spina bifida patients who had urinary dysfunction, as is common, were able to preserve their renal function into adulthood, and they began living even longer. Within a few decades, spina bifida was no longer considered a death sentence; people were living fuller, happier lives.
When Henry was diagnosed in 2012, postnatal surgery was still the standard of care – but that was about to change. The first major clinical trial for prenatal surgery and spina bifida, called Management of Myelomeningocele (MOMS) had just concluded, and its objective was to see whether repairing the baby's defect in utero would be beneficial. In the trial, doctors assigned eligible women to undergo prenatal surgery in the second trimester of their pregnancies and then followed up with their children throughout the first 30 months of the child's life.
The results were groundbreaking: Not only did the children in the surgery group perform better on motor skills and cognitive tests than did patients in the control group, only 40 percent of patients ended up needing shunts compared to 80 percent of patients who had postnatal surgery. The results were so overwhelmingly positive that the trial was discontinued early (and is now, happily, the medical standard of care). Our doctor relayed this information to us over the phone, breathless, and left my husband and me to make our decision.
After a few days of consideration, and despite the benefits, my husband and I actually ended up opting for the postnatal surgery instead. Prenatal surgery, although miraculous, would have required extensive travel for us, as well as giving birth in a city thousands of miles from home with no one to watch our toddler while my husband worked and I recovered. But other parents I met online throughout our pregnancy did end up choosing prenatal surgery for their children – and the majority of them now walk with little assistance and only a few require shunting.
Even more amazing to me is that now – seven years after Henry's diagnosis, and not quite a decade since the landmark MOMS trial – the standard of care could be about to change yet again.
Regardless of whether they have postnatal or prenatal surgery, most kids with spina bifida still experience some level of paralysis and rely on wheelchairs and walkers to move around. Now, researchers at UC Davis want to augment the fetal surgery with a stem cell treatment, using human placenta-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (PMSCs) and affixing them to a cellular scaffold on the baby's defect, which not only protects the spinal cord from further damage but actually encourages cellular regeneration as well.
The hope is that this treatment will restore gross motor function after the baby is born – and so far, in animal trials, that's exactly what's happening. Fetal sheep, who were induced with spinal cord injuries in utero, were born with complete motor function after receiving prenatal surgery and PMSCs. In 2017, a pair of bulldogs born with spina bifida received the stem cell treatment a few weeks after birth – and two months after surgery, both dogs could run and play freely, whereas before they had dragged their hind legs on the ground behind them. UC Davis researchers hope to bring this treatment into human clinical trials within the next year.
A century ago, a diagnosis of spina bifida meant almost certain death. Today, most children with spina bifida live into adulthood, albeit with significant disabilities. But thanks to research and innovation, it's entirely possible that within my lifetime – and certainly within Henry's – for the first time in human history, the disabilities associated with spina bifida could be a thing of the past.