Drugs nearing approval for fibromyalgia
Back in January, Reuters had this article on the mysterious pain condition referred to as fibromyalgia
Drugs nearing approval for mysterious pain condition | Health | Reuters.com:
The condition is controversial because it is not east to diagnose and there is no test for it. The diagnosis is made based on patient complaints and responses to subjective questions during an exam. It is estimated that the condition may affect as many as 12 million Americans mainly females. I’m not qualified to say wether or not it should be a recognized disease but it is interesting to note that several major pharma companies are looking at this as an area ripe for new drugs to target this. Among the companies actively developing drugs for fibromyalgia are Pfizer, Lilly, Forest Labs and Wyeth. There may be more but these are mentioned in the above article.
Why is big pharma interested in this? Because it could be a $1 billion market by 2014; it is currently fairly small. The first drug could be approved as soon as next year for fibromylagia. Already Cymbalta from Lilly and Lyrica from Pfizer are being used off label to treat fibromylagia. If either of these two could get approved for this additional indication it could be another $ 200-400 million in annual sales annually for them..
The first approach is to test drugs that companies already sell for other diseases to try and see if they work. Longer term, I am sure their is research ongoing to develop new chemical entities (NCEs) specifically for this condition. However, given the lack of basic understanding of the disorder, it must be difficult to find an animal model to do testing in.
Other Resources
National Fibromyalgia Association
National Fibromyalgia Research Association
fibromyalgia - Yahoo! Search Results
fibromyalgia - Google Search
Technorati Tags: Cymbalta, fibromyalgia, Lyrica, Wyeth
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