Empowered Patient Podcast SMART Opioids Mitigate Risks of Opioid Abuse for Safer Pain Management with Greg Sturmer and Tom Jenkins Elysium Therapeutics
Greg Sturmer, CEO and Co-Founder, and Tom Jenkins, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of Elysium Therapeutics, talk about their SMART Opioid O2P, which aims to address the risks of taking opioids while still delivering the analgesic efficacy of opioids. The compound is designed to be resistant to abuse through snorting or injections and includes a trypsin inhibitor that prevents the release of the opioid when multiple pills are ingested. Elysium is also developing SOOPR, an opioid overdose rescue medication that has a longer duration of action to counteract the longer-lasting effects of synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl.
Greg explains, "When we talk about our SMART opioids for pain, SMART stands for Safer Medicines that Alleviate Risks and Trauma. Our space is led by our O2P hydrocodone product candidate, and O2P stands for oral overdose protection."
"So what O2P hydrocodone is designed to do is mitigate those major risks associated with existing prescription opioids, but doing so without sacrificing their superior analgesic efficacy, especially when compared to currently marketed non-opioid alternatives and those in development. We're excited to say that we've demonstrated human proof of concept in a recent study that we announced. But what I'd like to do is have Tom step in. Again, he is the inventor of our technology. He's a PhD synthetic organic chemist out of Stanford. Tom, do you want to talk about the technology and maybe compare it to past attempts at abuse-deterrent formulation?"
Tom elaborates, "How we answer the question and how our technology works is fairly straightforward. What we've done is we've taken the opioid molecule with hydrocodone, and we can use any opioid molecule, morphine, oxycodone, or any of the prescription opioids. What we do is make a molecular modification to the drug. The key part of that is the conditional bioavailability of the drug is the fact that the drug has to see digestive enzyme, specifically trypsin, in the small intestine before it can be converted to an active drug."
#ElysiumTherapeutics #Opioids #OpioidAbuse #SyntheticOpioids #OpioidUseDisorder #PainManagement #SaferMedicines