In the first clinical trial of gene therapy for treatment of intractable pain, U.S. researchers from the University of Michigan's Department of Neurology observed that the treatment appears to be able to provide substantial pain relief.
In a study published online in the Annals of Neurology and seen on Monday, the researchers showed that the novel agent NP2 is safe and
well-tolerated. In addition, measures of pain in the treated patients suggested that NP2 may provide a substantial analgesic effect.
NP2 is a gene transfer vector that expresses the naturally- occurring opioid peptide enkephalin. In preclinical work in animals, David Fink,
chair of the Department of Neurology, and his coworkers had demonstrated that injection of NP2 into the skin reduces pain in models of pain caused by nerve damage, inflammation or cancer.
In the clinical trial, 10 patients with unrelenting pain caused by cancer were injected with the gene transfer agent in the area of skin
related to the location of pain.
"The concept underlying this therapeutic approach is that injection of NP2 into the skin results in uptake into the nervous system and the production and release of a pain-relieving chemical in a controlled site in the pain pathway," says Fink. "In the study, patients who received the low dose of vector showed little reduction in pain;
patients receiving the higher doses showed a greater than 80 percent reduction in pain over the course of four weeks following treatment."
Fink's laboratory has been working on the use of modified herpes simplex virus-based vectors that are taken up by sensory nerves following skin injection to develop therapies for diseases of the
nervous system for more than 20 years. Patents related to this technology have been exclusively licensed by Diamyd Medical, a publicly-traded Swedish biotechnology company that sponsored the
trial, and the human-grade vector NP2 was produced by Diamyd, Inc, the U.S. subsidiary of Diamyd Medical.
A phase 2 trial to compare NP2 to a placebo control has already been initiated under sponsorship from Diamyd.