The Future of Pain Management: Personalized Medicine

We are all different, from our genetics and health conditions, through to our culture and our environment. As patients, all of these can have a huge impact on how we receive treatment – both positively and negatively. In our globalized world, where anyone from anywhere could be seeking treatment for similar symptoms, just as two symptoms could originate from different illnesses, a treatment might work for one person and not for another. That’s why it’s vital for medical practitioners to keep in mind that one treatment may only serve a specific subgroup and struggle to relieve pain for millions of others.

And that is especially true in pain management.

One of the many emerging strategies new technologies have allowed for is personalized medicine, where medical practitioners use their patients’ specific traits, environment and in particular their genetic profile to inform treatment decisions.

With a greater knowledge of a patient’s phenotypic / genetic profile, it’s much easier for doctors to select the best possible solutions for their treatment. Doctors already make decisions around treatments that are affected by a patient’s beliefs or cultural ideas, and with personalized medicine, these can help find treatments that better suit the patient’s genetic requirements.

Traditionally, previously developed pain medication has focused on the most general and large pain conditions like back pain or arthritis, rather than treating smaller subpopulations or more specific pain diseases that often get overlooked in treatment development.

By adapting the approach to development so it includes a personalized medicine strategy, analgesics researchers can see a range of benefits. 

Better Insight into Treatment

By utilizing a strategy built around consideration of personalized medicine during the development of analgesics, pharmaceutical companies can create treatments that are specific to certain genetic types, patient subgroups and less common conditions like rare diseases.

But this doesn’t just help patients. By focusing on specific types of patients, pharmaceutical companies can gain more knowledge and insight into the illness they’re treating and the treatment itself.

Improved Medication Selection

With that better insight into patients, treatments and illnesses, pharmaceutical companies can development the best drug and specific dose for each patient, which can massively improve a drug’s efficacy whilst impacting the possibility of unwanted side effects appearing.

Reducing Cost of Clinical Trials

By considering patient subgroups or genetic targets before clinical trials begin, the failure rate of clinical trials can be massively reduced. In analgesics, this is one of the biggest hurdles to the development of treatment. Personalized medicine can help make clinical trials cost less and can heavily reduce the time it takes to conduct them.

Personalized Medicine Trends

Within personalized medicine, we’re seeing several possibilities for personalized medicine strategies to be utilized:

Genetic Profiling

By studying how genomic alterations and transcriptomic programming affect drug response, those seeking treatment for a patient can do so based on their unique genetic profile. This technique has already been used to help researchers in the identification and treatment of cancer cells, which until recently was seen as a near impossibility because of the heterogeneity in most phenotypic features of human cancers.

It will be interesting to see what can be realized as the pharmaceutical industry moves forward with analgesics research utilizing personalized medicine strategies. Many rare diseases, which are currently neglected in pain research, have a genetic link which can provide new targets for analgesics. This means having a more personalized approach will make analgesics research much easier.

Digital Therapeutics

As technology improves and datasets grow, technical innovations like AI and digital platforms will make the development and research of personalized medicine much easier.

Our Personalized Analgesics®️ platform Pain Cloud®️ is built to support pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as CROs in the research of pain medication.

Pain Cloud is a comprehensive platform designed to advance research and clinical development for pain-related diseases. By utilizing the Personalized Analgesics® in-silico network biology technology, it connects drug targets with genetic and biological pathways specific to pain conditions. This approach, combined with the proprietary Pain Landscape® database of over 1,000 diseases, helps researchers de-risk R&D processes and improve clinical development.

Pain Cloud also offers significant opportunities for market extension by accurately matching existing pain medication mechanisms to new conditions. By utilizing this innovative technology, analgesics researchers can support drug repurposing, by identifying novel applications for existing medicines, linking them to previously unassociated pain conditions, opening new possibilities for clinical projects.

The Role of Biomarkers

Developing treatments for chronic pain comes with a host of challenges, from cost to failure rate to the massive range of pain types that need to be confronted. This is why it has been over a decade since a new pain medication has been released to the market. But through continued research around biomarkers, analgesics research and development will continue to discover new insights into the complexities around chronic pain.

Brain imaging, for example could provide objective biomarkers of key characteristics and mechanisms related to chronic pain that could guide personalized pain management as it continues to progress.

AI and Machine Learning

Biomarkers aren’t the only new technology that is going to support the rise in personalized medicine and pain management. As AI continues to develop, we’re seeing more and more clinical researchers take advantage of the advanced insights possible with AI to allow for a huge range of benefits including early diagnosis, disease progression monitoring, validating treatment, even treatment selection, just to name a few.

These technological advancements, combined with personalized pain treatments means that practitioners will have a much easier time identifying the root causes of pain and developing treatments that specifically match the requirements of the patient.

Here at EptivA Therapuetics, we developed Pain Cloud® specifically to support in the development of personalized pain medicine. Pain Cloud uses AI to analyze the full breadth of the over 1,000 pain types across the pain landscape to allow for a personalized approach to research and development.

By linking research targets to specific pain conditions, Pain Cloud can allow for a revolution in the way analgesics works and can lay the groundwork for future approaches to personalized medicine.

We are on the precipice of a golden age of pain treatment thanks to personalized medicine, but pharmaceutical companies need to take action and seize on the possibilities. The ones that invest early will see massive benefits moving forward and as we continue to see developments in technology, new and unique insights into research, identification, development and treatment will appear to help in the creation of analgesics for chronic pain sufferers who have yet to receive the care that works best for them – all whilst being easier and more affordable than ever before.