MEDI 255

Patients who have neuropathic pain describe it as a burning sensation or an electric shock, and have compared it to sitting on needles and pins. The most commonly used drugs are anti-epileptic agents, anti-depressants, local anesthetics, and narcotics. Unfortunately, the current therapies are efficacious in only a fraction of the patient population and leave physicians with limited treatment options.

Most molecules in use to date are active against multiple targets. With the exception of the narcotics, their most common denominator is activity on sodium or calcium channels.

We believe that a rational, channel specific approach will lead to better therapeutics for this area of drug discovery. Therefore, we have developed a comprehensive platform that combines high throughput screening for ion channels, medicinal chemistry, and in vivo neuropathic pain pharmacology. This offers us the opportunity to rapidly identify and develop new profiles with molecules specifically designed for the treatment of neuropathic pain, and potentially for other nervous system diseases where ion channels play a critical role.

In this presentation, we will discuss our screening technology (E-VIPR), which allowed us to evaluate our corporate collection as well as known drugs for their sodium and calcium channel activity. We will show data for molecules that compare favorably with known drugs. We will also discuss animal models for neuropathic pain and the effect of subtype specific NaV blockers in these models.