Monday, May 2, 2011

Yale to work with Icagen, Pfizer on novel pain treatments

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

The Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., said it will collaborate with Icagen Inc. and Pfizer to explore the potential efficacy of investigational compounds as novel treatments for a rare pain disorder. No financial terms were disclosed.

The trio will target investigational compounds identified from an existing collaboration between Icagen and Pfizer that may be useful to treat pain in people with a rare genetic disorder called inherited erythromelalgia (IEM), or the “man on fire syndrome.” People who suffer from IEM experience a debilitating, life-long burning pain.

The collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Stephen G. Waxman and Sulayman D. Dib-Hajj in Yale’s department of neurology will study the effects of selectively blocking Nav1.7 sodium channels with the compounds. Nav1.7 produces impulses in pain-sensing neurons.

Waxman’s team, working at the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System in West Haven, Conn., previously showed that IEM sufferers have mutations of Nav1.7 channels that increase activity in these neurons, leading to pain.

Investigators at Yale, Pfizer and Icagen will try to determine whether their compounds can block IEM Nav 1.7 channels in vitro (outside a living organism in a test tube). That may lead to future clinical studies of those compounds in IEM patients and other pain disorders.

Dr. Waxman noted that sodium channels are molecular generators within nerve cells, which produce electrical impulses. In IEM patients, mutations cause Nav1.7 to be overactive, so by blocking the over-active channels, it may be possible to treat pain in IEM patients.
 
Icagen CEO P. Kay Wagoner said the studies may help in the company’s broader efforts to find novel sodium channel treatments for patients with various pain conditions. Icagen, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., develops oral, small molecule drugs that modulate ion channel targets.

The Yale School of Medicine on March 30 signed another industry partnership with Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, Calif., on cancer therapies that could bring up to $100 million to the school.