Pain Drug Development Becomes Personalized

25 Feb 2013

Advances in pain neurobiology point to the promise of more specific drugs with fewer side effects, yet the field continues to show few successes. Nevertheless, fast-advancing knowledge, a huge market, and better clinical study de-risking strategies should eventually overcome investor shyness about backing emerging personalized pain drug developers.

“In the past there was a simple-minded notion that pain is pain is pain,” says Clifford Woolf, director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Children’s Hospital Boston and a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. “Now we know there’s a whole series of different types of pain.” And that means pain, like other diseases where science is fast mapping previously hidden mechanistic pathways, will require drugs as differentiated as the disease.

Woolf is the neurobiologist credited as the first to show that abnormal central nervous system sensitization can provoke the pain...