Wellcome Trust supports development of new painkiller for chronic pain
19 July 2010
The award, under the Trust's Seeding Drug Discovery initiative, follows a smaller award of £540 000 to fund early-stage research and takes the total support for this project to £4.3 million.
The team, led by the Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol, David Wynick, will be working with the UK contract drug discovery company BioFocus and the university spin-out company NeuroTargets to develop a new analgesic drug based on the protein galanin.
Neuropathic pain is caused by damage or injury to the nerve cells involved in sensing pain. It affects about half of people with diabetes, and of those around 15-20 per cent will develop chronic pain.
Galanin is a small protein that is made by nerve cells and is produced in much greater quantities when these cells are damaged. After ten years of looking at the effects of galanin, Professor Wynick and his colleague Dr Fiona Holmes have shown that it reduces neuropathic pain in a number of animal models of disease, including diabetes.
"A drug that mimics the effects of galanin could offer relief to the millions of people with diabetes worldwide that currently suffer from this debilitating pain. At present we know of no other pharmaceutical company that is exploring galanin to develop a pain treatment and we are delighted that the Wellcome Trust is supporting our work in this area," said Professor Wynick.
Rick Davis, Business Development Manager at the Wellcome Trust, commented: "Existing painkillers can prove largely ineffective against neuropathic pain so we are pleased to support this project, which addresses an area of huge unmet clinical need."
Diabetes is the most common cause of neuropathic pain, which is often experienced as a burning or electrical pain. In the UK, about 5 per cent of the population are currently living with diabetes. Latest estimates from the World Diabetes Foundation predict that the world's population of people with diabetes will jump from 285m in 2010 to 438m by 2030, given the increasing levels of obesity, indicating a potentially huge demand for a more effective painkiller.
Development of a drug suitable for testing in human trials is expected to take around three years. If successful, it will then take at least another eight years before a drug could be commercially available.
The Seeding Drug Discovery initiative has been extended for another five years, with the injection of a further £110m. The next deadline for preliminary applications is 19 November 2010.
Image: Composite artwork illustrating the severe pain of a migraine or sinus problems. Credit: Darren Hopes
