(RedOnline) - The health benefits of red wine have been widely reported. Now, scientists are trying to bottle up all that goodness in a pill.

Resveratrol, the red wine ingredient research claims can protect against heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease, occurs in the beverage at low concentrations. Meanwhile, purified resveratrol gets broken down by the liver too quickly and requires high concentrations to be effective. You'd need to drink 1,000 bottles of wine a day to get an effective enough dose to slow down Alzheimer's, for example. No human can possibly do that.

Enter researchers. At the University of New South Wales near Sydney, Australia, they've been trying to develop a pill that combines purified resveratrol with wine's other compounds, which they've seen makes the substance more effective. At Jupiter Orphan Therapeutics Inc, a biotech company in Florida, they're developing a formula of resveratrol that prevents the molecule from being broken down by the liver. The goal is to create something that "mimic[s] the synergistic effect that is found in a glass of red wine without the negative effects of alcohol." The University of New South Wales and Jupiter Orphan Therapeutics have plans to test their resveratrol products with Alzheimer's and Friedreich's ataxia (a condition that causes people to lose control of their limbs), respectively.