Pain Cloud® Launch: A Collaboration between EptivA and Infopoly Ltd., creating an advanced solution to Pain Research.
It has been over a decade since the last new chronic pain medicine was approved by regulators, even though 1.5 billion people currently suffer chronic pain worldwide. The challenges faced during the research and development stages of pain therapeutics make it a time-intensive and costly endeavour for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, with only a 1% clinical development success rate.
To address this situation, the first precision analgesics company, EptivA Therapeutics, in a strategic partnership with digital technology experts Infopoly Ltd., has developed Pain Cloud®, a transformative new target validation in-silico platform designed to assist companies that develop analgesics increasing clinical development success.
The Key Challenges with Analgesics Research and Development
Chronic pain is caused by a multitude of factors, but the existing market sees development focusing only on a few of the most prevalent pain diseases, despite the fact that there are over 1,000 diseases with the potential to cause chronic pain.
Researchers often rely on non-translatable experiments using animal models or cell-cultures in early development. These might give valuable insights into preclinical biological mechanisms underlying pain, but there is limited evidence that they can provide target validation for these mechanisms in humans. Development costs remain high and clinical trials continue to be ran in the same patient groups rather than those most relevant for the research target.
Until now, there has not been an efficient and cost-effective way of linking the latest available molecular biology research on pain mechanisms with chronic pain conditions, thus enabling the successful development of new analgesics.
With Pain Cloud, EptivA Therapeutics are changing the way that analgesics development is conducted.
What is Pain Cloud?
Pain Cloud is an in-silico method, based on network biology principles, linking open access ‘large-data’ for unbiased ‘omic’ enrichment with Pain Cloud’s Proprietary Pain Landscape®, which hosts a wide range of data on over 1,000 distinct pain conditions.
This approach has been validated through the exploration of data for existing approved medicines, as well as other targets which failed in the clinical development phase following positive pre-clinical research.
EptivA Therapeutics has already entered a research collaboration with Bayer Pharmaceuticals to use this approach for some of their projects.
A new way of looking at pain
By partnering with the digital technology experts at Infopoly, Pain Cloud has been enhanced with a range of software tools to make its application as useful and effective as possible. Its network biology algorithm can be operated automatically, giving access to large data sets from high-quality molecular databases, providing unbiased analyses linking research targets to optimised disease phenotypes.
Our Personalized Analgesics® bioinformatic approach creates thousands of nodes of data via novel human-focused network biology, all linked to our proprietary Pain Landscape® database of thousands of diseases.
The benefits
By using Pain Cloud’s technology, analgesics development will be quicker, less expensive, and more successful. It is hoped that safer, more efficacious, and more targeted pain medications, utilizing insights from Pain Cloud, will become available to those who need it most in the next few years.
Mark J Field, CEO and Co-founder of EptivA Therapeutics says: “Infopoly have further developed our novel methodology, enabling an Advanced Pain Management Solutions B2B platform. By utilising Pain Cloud, researchers can solve the cost-intensive traditional R&D with a streamlined process to precisely match targets and mechanisms to specific patient groups that saves time and reduces spending.”