Competition for Canbex




As you may know we are trying to develop a treatment for spasticity. Baclofen is the usual go to drug, but it is not without its problems. One is the Zombie effect because it is very sedating because it is sedative, because it inhibits nerve function making muscle weakness and having cognitive effects. 

It also has a low binding affinity for its target the GABA B receptor. So you need high blood/brain levels for it to work. 

Next the other problem it has a short half life = the time taken for half of the drug to disappear. This means that the drug is gone within 8hours.

This means that it can't get you through the night. Therefore you have to wake up. to dose in the night or you are going to wake up with stiffies...yet stiff legs and hands. 

So you have a peak and a trough in drug levels meaning cogfog to maintain therapy or if you try avoid the cogfog it is an "on" and "off" with the drug working. 

In this study presented at the AAN they have taken baclofen and re-formulated it to give a slow release to avoid the peaks and the troughs but to create a longer half life, so you can have a twice a day pill. In this study they show that the long-life pill is better than placebo but no different from baclofen and it drops the levels of side effects.

So if this drug makes it it this creates competition for our drug, if our drug every makes it. 

Our claim is not that it will work better than current drugs, it is that that it will avoid the side-effects e.g. sedation of current drugs. 

How does it do this? ....Magic?.....You will soon find out.

If you fit the profile and are interested in participating in our trial of VSN16R and can get to...or are willing to go to London (UCL or Barts), Liverpool or Sheffield, you can contact one of the centres (CLICK).

The study will last less than 1 month.


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