Innovative Compound for Pain Relief

Pain relief can be now provided by a newly developed innovative compound at the University of Arizona Health Sciences. The study has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Pain is experienced by people at some point in their lives. Nearly 100 million people in the U.S. suffer from chronic pain as per the estimates of the National Institutes of Health.

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‘Pain relief can be now provided by a newly developed safe and effective, innovative compound dubbed 194 with no addictive outcomes. ’

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Around 21-29% of patients who are prescribed opioids for chronic pain, misuse them and 8-12% of people using an opioid for chronic pain develop an opioid use disorder, as per the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. died from opioid-involved overdoses in 2019.

Drug Formulation

“Drug discovery for chronic pain is at the forefront of this research, and it's being amplified by the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid epidemic. Drug discovery is a very arduous process. Our lab looked at a fundamental mechanism of pain, came up with a way to differentiate it from those before us and found a compound that has the potential as a new non-opioid treatment for pain,” says Rajesh Khanna, Ph.D., associate director of the UArizona Health Sciences Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center, professor of pharmacology in the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson, and member of the BIO5 Institute.

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The study team targeted a common sodium ion channel to reverse pain, thereby developing a safe and effective non-opioid pain reliever with no addictive outcomes.

Neurons (nerve cells) use electrical currents to send and receive signals to and from the brain and throughout the body. Sodium-ion channels are vital to a cell's ability to generate those electrical currents.

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The biological mechanism that is targeted by the team involves a specific sodium ion channel linked to the pain sensation – NaV1.7, which is associated with rare pain disorders.

Novel Compound for Pain Relief

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Several previous attempts to block NaV1.7 have failed. Hence the team intended to indirectly regulate it using a newly designed compound by them, dubbed 194.

To their surprise, they were able to successfully regulate the NaV1.7 activation in the laboratory using nerve cells from four different species, including humans. Moreover, the compound was efficient in reversing pain in six different pain models in both sexes in animal models.

The team also observed a synergistic effect when 194 was combined with morphine and gabapentin, thereby promising that 194 could also be used in a dose-reduction strategy for painkillers that have negative side effects.

The compound 194 is UArizona patented and licensed to startup Regulonix LLC through Tech Launch Arizona. The team is further set to file the potential pain-relieving drug for Food and Drug Administration approval to begin clinical trials.

Source-Medindia