BIO Issues Report on State of Innovation for Pain, Addiction Therapeutics

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization released a new report detailing the current state of research, development and funding for pain and addiction therapeutics, noting a declining trend of company investment over the last decade could threaten innovations.

There are a total of 220 clinical-stage drug programs in the industry-wide pain pipeline, with 125 of them testing novel chemical entities in the clinic and 87 percent of which are for non-opioid receptors, BIO reported.

“These are relatively low numbers when compared to the current pipeline for oncology,” the report said, noting that there are 2,617 total programs and 1,700 novel drug clinical-stage programs in the oncology pipeline.