Empowered Patient Podcast New Tools to Combat Prescription Opioid Abuse and Synthetic Opioid Overdoses Greg Sturmer Elysium Therapeutics
Greg Sturmer, Co-Founder and CEO of Elysium Therapeutics, a company with expertise in reducing pain and addressing opioid use disorder and fatal overdose from fentanyl. Elysium has developed O2P, Oral Overdose Protection, a technology that aims to control the impact of opioids and reduce the risk of use disorder or a fatal overdose. SOOPR is a rescue agent designed specifically for overdoses from synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, which can last longer and be more potent than traditional opioids.
Greg explains, "Anytime there’s an epidemic, you want to control exposure. The tricky bit in the area of pain management and the use of opioids is how do you control exposure without affecting patient care. We’ve come up with a technology that maintains the unmatched efficacy of the opioids. But when somebody takes too many pills, and we’ve actually shown this in our human study, we can reduce the exposure because we use this proprietary molecular delivery system that uses the body’s natural digestive process to control how much of the opioid gets released. That’s how we’re addressing the front end of the issue, where somebody is prescribed an opioid."
"But sadly, what happens today is several individuals progress along the road to opioid use disorder, and they end up using illicit drugs. That’s where our second program, SOOPR, comes into play. As you know, our streets in the US have been flooded with fentanyl. Fentanyl is a highly potent opioid. The cartels have gotten very wise in how to expand their market. They introduced fentanyl-laced pills because a lot more people are willing to take pills rather than inject. Well, that changed the game dramatically because when somebody overdoses orally on fentanyl, that puts them at risk of respiratory depression for hours where they stop breathing."
"Existing rescue agents like Narcan and Opvee weren’t designed for oral synthetic opioids and overdoses of those drugs. SOOPR, we believe, is the first rescue agent designed specifically for synthetic opioids. What it does is it outlasts that synthetic opioid danger zone, blocking the mu-opioid receptors and preventing that respiratory depression or rescuing somebody who’s already in respiratory depression."
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