Targeting Chronic Pain

Neurogen LLC was founded to address Chronic Pain, un unmet medical need that affects millions of patients around the world. At present there is no treatment for chronic pain. All drugs currently used in Chronic Pain  treatment are palliative – they treat the symptoms, not the causes of chronic pain. The effect of such treatments is temporary, pain returns, often more intense, as soon as the treatment is stopped.

Opioids are the only drugs that specifically treat pain however these are adequate for acute, not chronic pain. When used more than a few days, opioids lead to dependence and eventually to addiction and to a long list of adverse effects. Longer term use of opioids also results in a paradoxical increase in pain, a process known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Current opioid crisis has lead to severe social and economic issues, including drug wars around the world.

Although billions of dollars have been spent for scientific research by governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world no new therapies for chronic pain have emerged. Except for opioids, all other drugs currently prescribed for chronic pain were initially developed for other conditions, such as: anticonvulsants (gabapentin, pregabalin), antipyretics (acetaminophen), anti-inflammatory/NSAIDs (aspirin, naproxen, diclofenac and others), antidepressants (duloxetine, venlafaxine, amitriptyline, doxepin, etc), antipsychotics (quetiapine, olanzapine),  muscle relaxants (methocarbamol) and even benzodiazepines (diazepam). Most of the drugs in this list also have significant addictive potential as well as other serious adverse effects. This situation is the result of an incomplete understanding of Chronic Pain mechanisms, which has prevented a logical, systematic approach to drug discovery and the development of appropriate drug selection assays.

While pain is transmitted through a complex mechanism that involves many regions of the brain and spinal cord, we are focusing on a recently discovered mechanism that explains many physiological and pathological aspects of chronic pain. This mechanism also explains many chronic pain syndromes related to genetic variations, opening the door to personalized medicine.

Based on this mechanism and using innovative, cutting-edge patented technology, we have identified a new class of drugs and developed a new system of assays for drug development. Our goal is to develop chronic pain drugs with long-term action that do not require continuous administration and that could substitute at least partially opioid use. Some of these drugs are developed to address chronic pain syndromes resulting from individual genetic variations.

Coincidentally, some of the compounds in this class have been validated as chronic pain medication by centuries of traditional medicine, being present in high concentration in plants used in traditional medicine to treat pain