Migraine arrests the pain circuitry in our heads and existing drugs fail to relieve many sufferers, providing plenty of incentives for drug developers to chase unconquered targets to combat the debilitating headaches. And The Wall Street Journal analyzes one of the most coveted targets in the pharma industry called CGRP.
The brain chemical is a suspect in transmitting pain signals, yet previous efforts at Merck ($MRK) and Boehringer Ingelheim to block the activity of CGRP have failed. Merck pulled the plug on its late-stage CGRP antagonist, telcagepant, last year over concerns about liver toxicity, the WSJ reported. Bristol-Myers Squibb ($BMY) has picked up the torch with a similar drug called BMS-927711 in early-stage trials, and other developers are studying antibody drugs that can capture the chemical in the blood stream before migraines hit.
The multibillion-dollar market for migraine meds fell from $3.4 billion in 2010 to $3.2 billion in 2011, according to market research from Decision Resources, and generic competition to GlaxoSmithKline's ($GSK) Imitrex played a role in the decline. Plenty of outfits are developing reformulated versions of triptan drugs such as Imitrex, yet not all patients respond to that class of compounds. The lack of effective drugs for some patients has fueled efforts to block CGRP and other suspected causes of migraine.
The FDA stamped an approval on Allergan's ($AGN) Botox in 2010 for chronic migraines, and Decision Resources expects this use of the well-known anti-wrinkle injections to help the market for migraine meds to hit $4.4 billion by 2020. Yet there are no cures for the headaches and the condition remains one of the world's biggest neurological problems, according to the World Health Organization.
Though CGRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide) remains one of the hottest targets in migraine drug research, Bristol and others are likely several years or more away from advancing such treatments to the market.
- get more in the WSJ article