Treating neuropathic pain with innovative dual agents

Eugènia Pujol

Universitat de Barcelona - Fundació Bosch i Gimpera, Spain

First-line treatments for neuropathic pain (NP), a multifactorial disease involving multiple mechanisms, are limited in their efficacy and have severe side effects. It is thus imperative to identify new therapeutic approaches with innovative mechanisms of action.

The researchers have identified a new family of well-balanced dual compounds capable of targeting two key proteins that modulate several of the pathways involved in NP.

The prevalent paradigm in drug discovery is based on high-affinity drugs directed towards single disease-specific targets. This project innovatively explores an alternative and revolutionary drug discovery approach based on:

1. conception of multifactorial diseases as complex pathological networks

2. the development of new drugs that concurrently hit several targets of the pathological network.

On the basis of this multitarget drug rationale, this project aims to optimize novel drugs that hit two relatively unexplored biological targets of utmost importance in NP networks. Importantly, both targets have shown to be safe in human clinical trials for other indications.