Drug companies are under fire right now, accused of not doing enough to curb the opioid epidemic. Now, some drug makers hope to be part of the solution, developing pain medication that isn’t addictive.
A small Seattle biotech called Kineta is in the race to get a new pain relief drug on the market.
“We need to have innovation,” said Shawn Iadonato, CEO of Kineta. “We need to provide patients with something better so that they’re not chronically addicted to these drugs, and so we hope to do that here.”
Kineta’s approach to pain relief originated in the depths of the sea with the cone snail. The snail’s venom paralyzes its prey, and scientists took a component of that venom into the lab using it to block pain.
“The venom is sort of a witch’s brew of many different things. So this is one component of the venom,” Iadonato said. “It was a small peptide in the cone snail, and we’ve developed and optimized it and improved it to make it more pharmaceutical. So it’s not very much like what came out of the cone snail originally, but it’s intended to be better and to work better for people.”
