Pharma Pursues Innovative Alternatives to Opioids

A new report from GBI Research states that while opioids remain the most effective modes of treatment for chronic pain, their potential for abuse is encouraging pharmaceutical companies to explore innovative alternatives.   The pain therapeutics pipeline is large and diverse, but it is characterized by a high overall historic clinical attrition rate for novel analgesics and a low level of first-in-class innovation, the report explains.    The active pain pipeline is populated by 810 products across all stages of development, which exhibit a highly diverse range of molecular targets. GBI identified 129 first-in-class programs in active development, constituting 20% of the pipeline for which there is a disclosed molecular target, and acting on 80 first-in-class molecular targets.   GBI analyst Dominic Trewartha commented: "While many companies are following a strategy of developing products with similar mechanisms of action to existing products, there are also many innovative products in the pain pipeline. These first-in-class products reflect a deepening scientific understanding of the underlying pathophysiology of pain, and a growing list of molecules that have been implicated in the initiation of acute pain and progression to a chronic pain state."   http://gbiresearch.com/report-store/market-reports