Health rising blog post, by Cort Johnson, 5 October 2016: A Race To Produce the First Drug for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Jarred Younger Talks
Drug companies interested in ME/CFS? A race to produce the first drug for ME/CFS? A race? Those almost sound like fantasies but that’s the message Jarred Younger brought in his recent video talk.
Are drug companies finally getting interested in ME/CFS?
The bottom line, he said, is that over the last three months he’s met with pharmaceutical companies who’ve realized that the first company to bring an ME/CFS drug to market is going to hit it big. Younger didn’t mention it, but it’s hard to believe that Ampligen’s approval in Argentina hasn’t caused the pharmaceutical industry to wake up a bit.
(One only has to look at Lyrica’s success in fibromyalgia. Lyrica is clearly not a perfect drug; it’s side effects prevent many from using it, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a blockbuster drug. In 2014 Lyrica, which is also approved for other conditions, was Pfizer’s top-selling drug and the top selling central nervous system drug period.)
When asked which mechanisms drug companies might be targeting Younger suggested two major themes: neuroinflammation and metabolism. Right now they’re in the information gathering and small pilot study phase. That’s obviously no guarantee that a drug will be developed, but it’s a big step forward for a disease that has never, except for Hemispherx Biopharma, received any pharmaceutical company interest.
Because any new drug has to go through animal and then human trials, a new drug for ME/CFS is years away. A quicker route companies are exploring, Younger said, is drug repurposing: using drugs that are FDA approved for other conditions than ME/CFS.
In its Biovista repurposing project, The Solve ME/CFS Initiative (then the CFIDS Association of America) uncovered a low dose naltrexone / Trazodone drug combination that might work. That idea never got off the ground, but both Ron Davis of the Open Medicine Foundation and Dr. Nancy Klimas of the Institute for Neuro-Immune Studies at Nova Southeastern University believe drug repurposing has to come first, and both are pursuing it.
Low Dose Naltrexone Drug Combination Proposed for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
Davis has samples of every known FDA approved drug in his tool kit. If he can determine which pathways are broken he can start doing preliminary lab studies to determine which drugs might work.
The movement forward validates what advocates have been saying for years: that the first drug approved for ME/CFS is going to reset the table, and that a strong research foundation is needed to produce that drug. Pharmaceutical companies, after all, target biological abnormalities and that requires biological research. In the absence of that “in” provided by biological research, treatment studies in ME/CFS will be dominated by approaches that require no biological foundation – such as CBT.
If Ron Davis can target common pathways he can starting testing drugs in his lab
Of course, we don’t have that strong research foundation yet, but it appears that we have enough of it that pharmaceutical companies are beginning to show interest.
The NIH, hopefully, is either tuned into some of these developments or is listening, because if Younger is right, this field could be on the cusp of an important breakthrough. A timely influx of funds could do wonders.
It wasn’t just drug companies. Younger also reported a new found interest from research labs. (Later, he talked about two clinical researchers who have asked to join his lab).
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