Session 8-3: Novel, Non-Psychoactive Cannabinoid Compounds for Treatment of Neuropathic Pain

M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: April 2008
Duration: 0 / 05:46

SensoEZ Pharmaceuticals Representative.

Hello. SensoEZ is a bio pharmaceutical company for use from the design, synthesis and characterization of all new compounds and we mainly focus on one target at the moment which is cannabinoid receptor and we want to discover a novel non-psychoactive cannabinoid compounds. Our first focus is a treatment of neuropathic pain.

So, why did we choose neuropathy pain? Because neuropathic pain--it's a pain which is caused by a lesion in the nervous system and is also associated with lot of disease such as diabetes, AIDS or it might induce also by chemotherapy. It's very painful disease, and you can imagine the pain when you heat your home and when you feel very painful simulate in your arm. It's more or less what patients feel when they go through neuropathic pain.

So the market for neuropathic pain is a huge market. It's around 2.5 billion dollar during 2007 and with increasing diabetes market and all this pathology it's expected to increase to seven billion dollars in 2015.

So there are some drugs on the market that are available but what designed to address some other pathology. So the three top player are mainly anti [inaudible], antidepressant, but also local anesthetic. There is nothing in the market that which target selectively CB2. There is two receptors for cannabinoid compounds. CB1 is mainly expressed in the brain and is directly linked to all the psychoactivity of the cannabinoid derivative. And there is another receptor though which have been cloned recently and which is mainly expressed in the immune system. And this receptor is CB2. We target this receptor. There is also some cannabinoid extract which are under clinical studies now but they lack activity for CB2. For example, THC, which is natural ingredient of marijuana, is a very weak agonist for CB2 compared to one of our compound MDA7.

So SensoEZ is a very young company. Because in two years we were able to design a chemistry platform, and in vivo platform to test the compound. All the in vitro profiling has been outsourced. And we try to address very early in the project the formulation. Now in our pipeline we have various compounds. MDA7 is our lead compound and is expected to reach phase 1 clinical studies in next year. At the end of next year. But we also have some back up compounds and also some inverse agonist which might address other admit pathology admit medical market. The team is a small team. There is Dr. Nagi, which is an anesthesiologist with more than 25 years experience in clinical research and medical chemist. And I work as a medicinal chemist and project Vanito for research for 12 years in a pharmaceutical company before moving here.

So now I am going to try to show you some data concerning our lead compounds MDA7. So, you use our lead MDA7 in the [inaudible] model of neuropathic pain. One of this model is a spinal ligation model. In which we induce the neuropathy by spinal ligation. So in this model our compound show a very good activity as we were able to reverse 80% of the pathology using 15 mg by kilograms dose of MDA7. We compare our compound to some standard drug, using the literature for example AM1241 and compared to AM1241 our compound show a greater activity, better activity. We also try to find if our compound was linked to other pathway. For example, [inaudible] pathway, and we used naloxen which is an antagonist for [inaudible] receptors. And naloxed didn't show any effect on the efficacy of our compound to treat neuropathy.

We also value at psychoactivity of MDA7 and we didn't see any psychoactivity of our compounds. The MDA7 is a drug like compound because we addressed, we did all the testing required for a drug. And we are able to now select MDA7 as a candidate for ING submission. So what we plan now is to get an ING in July 2009. For this ING we need some more money. One point five million dollars and to reach phase one studies in October 2009. And thank you for your attention and your time.

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