Liquid degradable aliphatic polycarbonate as an injectable drug delivery vehicle

慢性疼痛困扰着超过1亿北美人，目前的治疗方法只有一定的效果。特别是，阿片类药物通常用于这一目的，这导致了普遍的滥用和成瘾问题。此外，目前的常见治疗方法需要每天口服，这导致了患者依从性、过量用药和滥用的潜在问题。拟议工作的目标是开发一个植入式非阿片类药物仓库，在治疗水平上提供至少4周的交付。这些研究选择的候选药物是加巴喷丁阿卡比利，它被临床用于治疗慢性神经性疼痛。加巴喷丁将被纳入一种新型聚合物配方中，我们已经为其申请了专利保护。与潜在的工业合作伙伴的讨论清楚地表明，我们的聚合物商业开发的下一个必要步骤是在体内展示功效。因此，我们建议在大鼠模型中展示我们的新聚合物配方提供合适的药物输送的能力。

Chronic pain afflicts over 100 million North Americans and the current treatments are only moderately effective. In particular, opioids are commonly subscribed for this purpose, which has resulted in widespread problems with abuse and addiction. Moreover, current common therapy requires daily oral administration, leading to potential issues of patient compliance, overdose, and abuse. The objective of the proposed work is development of an implantable non-opioid drug depot that provides at least 4 weeks of delivery at therapeutic levels. The drug candidate chosen for these studies is gabapentin enacarbil, which is used clinically to treat chronic neuropathic pain. The gabapentin will be incorporated into a novel polymer formulation, for which we have filed patent protection. Discussions with potential industrial partners has made it clear that a necessary next step in the commercial development of our polymer is an in vivo demonstration of efficacy. As such, we propose to demonstrate the ability of our new polymer formulation to provide suitable drug delivery in a rat model.