The demand for effective treatments for chronic pain that have minimal side effects but long-lasting therapeutic benefits is large.
There is already good clinical evidence from the use of native neurotoxins that botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) can have analgesic activity, although the utility of this is limited by the toxicity of the native neurotoxins and their potent neuromuscular weakening. By engineering BoNTs that target nociceptive (pain sensing) neurons, the opportunity exists to develop more effective treatments for this all too prevalent condition.
Syntaxin's therapeutic proteins affect pain in the following way:
Our experimental data have demonstrated that the approach of retargeting clostridial neurotoxin proteases to pain fibres to cleave SNARE proteins and inhibit pain transmitter release is effective and has the potential to generate analgesic proteins with a prolonged duration of action suited to the treatment of chronic pain.
In collaboration with its licence partner Allergan, Syntaxin has taken this work forward to generate recombinant proteins. A candidate from this programme has been identified that is able to produce potent and long acting analgesia in a range of animal models of chronic pain and this candidate is now in pre-clinical development by Allergan to enable clinical testing of its utility as therapeutic protein for the treatment of chronic pain.