BUY AND BUY AND DIE? –
June 21. 2022 – “Despite the prevalence and societal costs of pain in the United States, investment in pain medication development is low, due in part to poor understanding of the probability of successful development of such medications,” said the authors of a study published in Anesthesiology.
“The opioid crisis has highlighted the need for new therapeutics with low abuse potential to treat chronic pain,” they said.
“While pharmaceutical companies recognize this need, because of the subjective nature of pain … the conduct of clinical trials for new drug approval is a lengthy and costly proposition.”
According to the authors, a better understanding of the probability of the successful development of new pain medications would reduce some of the investment risks.
In the retrospective study, Dermot P. Maher, M.D., M.S., M.H.S., assistant professor, John Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, and financial engineering colleagues at the MIT School of Management analyzed 469 pain pharmaceutical development programs involving 399 unique active pharmaceutical ingredients between 2000 and 2020.
They used publicly available clinical trial metadata from databases provided by Informa Pharma Intelligence to determine the probabilities of success, duration, and survivorship of the pain medication development programs.
