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While the United States is struggling with an epidemic of deadly opioids, there is an urgent need for better, non-addictive painkillers.
Using science at Harvard and $ 27 million in fresh funds, a health-care start-up just out of stealth mode is doing it.
The approach of Nocion Therapeutics uses badgesic drugs that you may recognize at the dentist, but in a different way, in order to make sure that these drugs work in a more targeted and effective manner.
Nocion has in mind an area that is often overlooked in conversations about pain – not surgery or chronic back pain, but coughing.
Although the condition may seem relatively benign, it is a fairly common complaint to send 30 million people annually to the United States to the doctor. Prescription cough medicines, on the other hand, usually contain opioids.
"I'm a supporter of something that seems like an interesting idea, and maybe other people have not thought about it," said CEO Richard Batycky at Business Insider in an interview.
And in the space in which Nocion is, "there was simply no innovation," he said. Batycky has a long history in the biotechnology industry, including eight years at Alkermes and more recently four years as Acorda's Chief Technology Officer.
He added that it would take at least a year before the company is ready to test potential drugs in humans.
Trojan horse borrows anesthetic drugs from dentist's office
Nocion's approach is based on local anesthetics or badgesics, such as the drug lidocaine.
Think about the last time you had a dental procedure.
Your dentist may be blunt with a local anesthetic to prevent pain. Maybe the process also prompted drooling.
These types of local non-addictive anesthetics such as opioids, which have already been proven in the treatment of pain, have become the new gateway to finding a better pain reliever.
According to an Informa Pharma Intelligence report released late last year, 28 of the 28 non-opioid drugs under development fall into this category.
Read more: Creating a new drug takes a decade and costs a fortune. Investors paid nearly $ 1 billion to start-up companies that were trying to fix the situation.
The Nocion project is targeting the same mechanism, using already approved drugs like lidocaine as "scaffolding," says Batycky. But then, society transforms them into something entirely new, especially through chemical changes that "charge" the molecule.
The type of process you learn in high school science clbad, the loading is not particularly at the forefront of technology. But Nocion uses it as a type of Trojan that activates the body so that it takes the painkiller and brings it, hopefully, to exactly the right place.
Charged medications are not common because our body usually eliminates charged molecules. But Nocion thinks he can exploit a process already under way in the body, for example when you touch an iced kettle or ice cube.
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The founding scientists of Nocion are Dr. Bruce Bean, Clifford Woolf and Bruce Levy, who work at Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital. They understood "why not just give up at the end of this, when the body has already solved the problem?" Said Batycky.
The fact that the company is using established drugs is a draw, said Julie Grant, a partner at Canaan Venture Capital, Business Insider.
Grant is the first to discover Harvard technology and co-lead the Nocion campaign with Tom Beck of F-Prime Capital Partners. Canaan and F-Prime Capital Partners led the Nocion Series A financing cycle, worth $ 27 million.
"The fact that sodium channel blockers work so well in people is something we should be careful about and neglected," Grant said.
The approach of Nocion can start in cough, with other types of pain also in the sight
Nocion, based in Cambridge, Mbad., Is likely to develop his experimental product to treat cough in the first place as an inhaled treatment.
There are many opportunities to treat cough, which exists across a spectrum. Some coughs begin after a virus, while others are related to certain diseases. The "mysterious cough", meanwhile, can persist for a long time without underlying medical reason.
Nocion also attacks other pains or itching in the gastrointestinal tract, as well as with different types of pain, such as those resulting from surgeries.
"If we can show that we have an effect on coughing and that we really understand this underlying mechanism, we will also be a stepping stone to further indications," Batycky said.
Read more: From gene therapy that led to a $ 9 billion acquisition of a drug against CBD for the treatment of rare types of epilepsy in children, here are the 12 promising drugs to watch out for in 2019
Local anesthetics have their problems. According to Mr. Batycky, coughing can cause side effects such as choking due to food.
But Nocion believes that his highly targeted approach could prevent the drug from being in the wrong place and causing side effects. It is also important to monitor the evolution of the company: how powerful is its medication. For cough use, a product must be strong enough to be administered in small inhalable doses.
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