Could an Investigational Therapy Help Fill the Gaps in Pain Management?
Albert Dahan, MD, PhD, professor of anesthesiology at Leiden University Medical Center, talks about the first-in-class dual-NMR agonist cebranopadol.
In the field of pain management, there are many gaps that continue to exist and adequate pain management is often not achieved. When pain is not sufficiently managed, it can lead to negative long-term effects on a patient’s physiological and psychological health.1 Higher pain intensity and frequency can also develop into chronic pain, which currently impacts around 20% of adults in the United States.2
Opioids have been considered an essential medication for pain management, but they do carry significant risk. Research has shown that there is a lack of data to support long-term benefits of opioids for chronic pain.3 That data also showed that long-term use of prescribed opioids put patients at a higher risk of overdose and opioid misuse. This is why other medications that do not carry the risk of severe side effects are needed.
Tris Pharma, a biopharmaceutical company working on drug development for ADHD, pain and addiction, recently presented data from a clinical study on cebranopadol, a first-in-class dual-NMR agonist that targets the nociceptin/orphanin FQ receptor and the µ-opioid receptor. Data showed that the therapy produces potent and prolonged analgesia with 25% less respiratory depression than oxycodone.4 The company believes cebranopadol could be a “potentially transformational new pain therapy.”
Drug Topics recently talked with Albert Dahan, MD, PhD, professor of anesthesiology at Leiden University Medical Center and a researcher on the cebranopadol study, about what cebranopadol is and how it’s different from traditional opioids, how it will fit into the broader landscape of pain management therapies, current gaps that exist in pain management and how the therapy might help address them, and what the next steps are for cebranopadol.
“I’m writing currently a paper on psychedelics and pain management,” Dahan said. “People use that. Why do they use that? Psychedelics are not at all drugs that you would like to use because they have psychedelic side effects: disassociation, hallucinations. The reason is, we don’t have drugs that are safe. We don’t have drugs that allow the patient to experience profound pain relief without side effects. People except these side effects because they think they’re safe…I really believe—I’ve done 2 studies [on cebranopadol] that were both quite good—that we’re reaching an area that is very interesting.”
