DAILY NEWS CLIP: October 28, 2024

UConn professors working to treat pain without opioid medication advance new ‘tool’ through startup


CT Insider – Sunday, October 27, 2024
By Cris Villalonga-Vivoni

Finding ways to treat pain is complex and difficult, and researchers have always sought to develop new therapeutic strategies, including Dr. Lakshmi Nair, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Connecticut, over the last two decades. 

Nair has worked to develop ways to extend the effectiveness of local anesthesia and reduce patients’ pain without impacting their mobility. 

Now, in collaboration with fellow orthopedic surgery professor Dr. Yusuf Khan, she aims to bring it out of the laboratory, into clinical trials and eventually to patients through their startup, Soleia Biosciences. Their goal is provide an additional clinical tool to help minimize the usage of opioid medication as a form of pain management.

“The question we were asking is ‘how to prolong the duration of an analgesic action of local anesthetics?’ Then this will have a significant value in other scenarios like post-surgical [pain] management or chronic pain management and so on,” Nair said. “That’s why we have been working for a long time. We have many, many iterations. We used many, many formulations and it was improving every time.” 

Khan said pain management and treatment options can range from medications to meditation. It often requires a mix of strategies to be effective, but the most commonly used pain management medications are opioids. These are highly effective but have adverse side effects, like grogginess and dizziness.

Opioids also pose a dependency risk if they are used for long periods to treat postoperative pain or chronic conditions. Khan said some patients have a general fear of opioids as a result and want an alternative.

“What we’re trying to do is add another tool to the toolbox that, in this instance, surgeons would have to offer their patients as they’re recovering from painful surgeries,” Khan said.

Normal local anesthesia typically lasts around two to 12 hours, producing a numbing sensation that gradually disappears, said Nair. It has a lot of applications throughout the medical field, especially in dentistry and with more minor procedures. However, it’s not as useful for significant surgeries or treating chronic pain since it only works for a short period.

Nair said they’ve extended the length of efficacy of a local anesthetic to extend its ability to offer pain relief, administered via injection like a typical anesthetic. She said each preclinical trial informed the next and has been able to build from there. The formulation has been shown in studies to reduce or relieve pain for over three weeks.

At the same time, the pain relief does not have a prolonged numbing effect. Instead, Nair said it provides an analgesic effect, which reduces pain to the point that allows a patient to remain relatively mobile. She said being able to stay functional after a major operation or while living with chronic pain can help in rehabilitation.

Although significant progress has been made and the preclinical trials with animals have been successful, both professors say there’s still much work to be done before patients will have access to the formulation.

Khan said researchers spend a lot of time figuring out the answers to complicated clinical problems but acknowledges significant challenges with getting their solutions to patients.

When research is near the clinical trial stage of a project, researchers need a company to take an interest in their project and turn it into a marketable product. Khan said the researchers can also develop a small company or a similar entity to move the project out of the laboratory and into the clinic, which is not uncommon but quite labor intensive.

Khan and Nair are both professors in biomedical engineering and materials sciences and engineering. They’ve known each other for over 20 years and often collaborate as part of the same team. Earlier this year, they launched Soleia Biosciences to bring Nair’s formulation to clinical trials and eventually into the hands of doctors and patients.

“We’ve seen how good ideas can languish because they don’t have a mechanism to get them out. We both had sort of independent interests in wanting to start something,” Khan said. “We realized that UConn has a lot of programs in place that are designed for exactly that.”

In March, they participated in the National Science Foundation I-Corps program through UConn and attended UConn’s Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation eight-week Summer Fellowship Accelerator with ten other university-affiliated startups.

Their company was one of five selected to compete in the annual Wolff New Venture Competition and won the first-place prize of $30,000. According to the university, they plan to use the funds to connect with experts that will help initiate the required clinical trials. 

Clinical trials are still a few years off, but Khan said they feel ready to navigate the business landscape and the next steps. He also said this helps them build an infrastructure that can be used for many other ideas in the future.

Nair said there are still many unknowns regarding biomedical products.

“The preclinical studies, over the years, we were perfecting it in that scenario, it is great. That’s where we are at this point,” Nair said. “When you go into clinical trials, we don’t know because it’s a complex and  different system we are kind of entering.”

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