Grant: Project Grant

The development of new drugs to treat chronic pain is vitally important; an estimated half the population have a chronic pain condition and 7% suffer debilitating daily pain. Further, more than half a million North Americans have died of opioid overdoses in the past 5 years as a result of the failure to develop effective non-addictive analgesic therapies. We previously designed and developed a novel non-opioid analgesic that targets a class of protein involved in nerve cell excitability. While highly promising, the drug has the drawback of interacting with multiple related protein family members of the same class. In this project we will combine state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, high resolution microscopy and focused drug screening to design and develop a second-generation drug that only targets the single intended protein. This effort will result in a novel non-addictive drug to treat chronic pain patients without the previous off-target liabilities.