Application for a small exchange award to fund a 6-month sabbatical for Professor Wynick at the Neurology & GI CEDD, GSK

Most pain killers never make it to market because of side effects and/or lack of effectiveness. In the 6 months I will spend at GSK, we will focus on the reasons for those failures and focus on (a) the most appropriate use of the latest cutting-edge in-vivo and in-vitro technologies to validate new pain targets and (b) new and improved models of neuropathic and spontaneous pain that are more relevant to the human diseases associated with chronic neuropathic pain eg multiple sclerosis and Type II diabetes mellitus.

Very many novel putative analgesic compounds fail as they go through lead optimisation, candidate selection and toxicology. However, the biggest failure rate is at the Phase IIa proof-of-concept (POC) stage. 90% of drugs are not efficacious in the disease area they are tested against, despite an extensive pre-clinical target validation package. This very high rate of attrition places a huge financial burden on pharmaceutical companies (pharma), and severely limits the number of POC studies they can undertake. The reasons for such a high failure rate are under active investigation by all pharma and will be the principal focus of this sabbatical period.

I will spend 6-months (for 4-days each week) at the Neurology & GI CEDD GlaxoSmithKline, working with Drs Chas Bountra (Vice President & Head of Biology) and Iain Chessell (Head of Pain Research), focusing on novel analgesics for neuropathic pain. The sabbatical period will allow me to better understand how a major international pharmaceutical company undertakes the process of drug discovery in relation to novel analgesics, and the associated regulatory environment and standards required by the FDA and MHRA. Specifically, we will focus on new initiatives to increase the probability of delivering successful Phase IIa POC studies for neuropathic pain.