Liquid degradable aliphatic polycarbonate as an injectable drug delivery vehicle

慢性疼痛困扰着超过1亿的北美人，目前的治疗方法只有中等效果。特别是，阿片类药物通常用于这一目的，导致滥用和成瘾问题普遍存在。此外，目前的常见疗法需要每日口服给药，导致患者依从性、过量和滥用的潜在问题。拟议工作的目标是开发一种可植入的非阿片类药物贮库，以治疗水平提供至少4周的递送。这些研究选择的候选药物是加巴喷丁enacarbil，临床上用于治疗慢性神经性疼痛。加巴喷丁将被纳入一种新的聚合物配方，我们已经申请了专利保护。与潜在工业合作伙伴的讨论表明，我们聚合物商业开发的下一步是体内功效证明。因此，我们建议证明我们的新聚合物制剂在大鼠模型中提供合适药物递送的能力。

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.