Different Conditions Our Therapeutics Can Help Remedy

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Other Early Pipeline Products:

  • Parkinson’s Disease

  • Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

  • Alzheimer’s Disease

  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

  • ALS / Frontotemporal Dementia

  • Glioblastoma multiforme

About Nociceptive Pain

Pain affects around 1.5 billion people worldwide. In most cases, pain is temporary and easily treated with commonly available analgesics. For some people, however, pain is a debilitating condition. Nociceptive pain (including somatic, visceral, and cutaneous pain) refers to the stimulation of nerve cells as a result of adjacent tissue damage and can be experienced in cases of mechanical, thermal, or another type of damage to bodily tissue. It can be sharp or throbbing and it can occur anywhere on or in the body. While it most often is acute, it can be chronic if it is related to arthritis or a similar condition.

The nociceptive pain market is driven by the prevalence of the major indications of arthritic pain, post-operative pain, cancer-related pain, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, and HIV-related pain. For many of these patients, opioids have been the most common form of drug used to treat moderate to severe pain.

However, opioid abuse in the U.S. has been rising at an alarming rate. Overdose of opioids has killed over 42,000 people in 2016 alone (over a thousand more Americans than die from breast cancer annually), with over half of those deaths being caused by prescription opioids. Hence, opioid abuse has been declared a “public health emergency” in the U.S., and this is likely to limit the growth of opioids in North America. This environment presents an opportunity for the development of non-opioid anti-nociceptive therapeutics like the one being developed by Ophidion.

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Analgesia: OCCT-NT

Ophidion is developing therapeutic interventions to treat nociceptive pain. Ophidion’s CNS Carrier Technology (OCCT) can bring a normally brain-impenetrable endogenous peptide analgesic Neurotensin (NT) into the brain to reduce pain. In vivo results have demonstrated dramatic enhancement of pain latency of OCCT-NT relative to NT without a carrier, representing an animal-proof of concept (PoC) and the ability of OCCT to deliver a peptide into the brain. Ophidion is pursuing the further preclinical development of OCCT-NT.

Anxiety Program: Small Molecule to Treat Anxiety Disorders,
including GAD and PTSD

Anxiety Program: Small Molecule to Treat Anxiety Disorders, including GAD and PTSD

GAD:

Anxiety disorders, which include generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder and panic attacks, agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, separation anxiety, and specific phobias, are among the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in modern society. An estimated 44 million American adults suffer from anxiety disorders. Only about one-third of those suffering from an anxiety disorder receive treatment, even though the disorders are highly treatable.

PTSD:

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event, like combat, a natural disaster, a car accident, or sexual assault. Most people who experience such events recover from them, but people with PTSD continue to be severely depressed and anxious for months or even years following the event.

The DSM-V diagnostic criteria for PTSD include four symptom clusters: reexperiencing, avoidance, negative alterations in cognition/mood, and alterations in arousal and reactivity. Only two medicines (the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors sertraline and paroxetine) are approved to treat PTSD; however, they only treat depressive effects of PTSD. Residual PTSD symptoms following treatment are the rule rather than the exception.

Ophidion has an advanced program that is positioned to enter pivotal clinical trials to treat GAD/PTSD, together with a patented companion biomarker diagnostic to select the appropriate patient population for these disorders.