I call the heroin capital of the United States my home.
Thanks to its central location on the Eastern seaboard, Baltimore is a major international shipping hub for the entire Northeast megalopolis that spans from Boston to Washington, D.C. While this position puts it as a major point of ingress for all types of illegal substances, opiates from the Middle East and North Africa are among the main drugs to land in the ports of Baltimore.
While the murder rate in Baltimore has lately been a topic of discussion in the wake of the Freddie Grey scandal, more people are killed by heroin.
In 2013, 150 people died of heroin overdoses. In 2014, that number had risen to 192, and in 2015, it’s still climbing.
The killer is the relapse. After kicking the incredibly strong addictive qualities of opiates such as heroin and its synthetic opioid cousins oxycodone and hydrocodone, users who return to old habits frequently overdose.
If these relapses can be stopped, deaths from opioid and opiate addiction can also be stopped in their tracks.
And recently, pharmaceutical company Titan Pharmaceuticals (OTC: TTNP) has announced some positive results for its implant for long-term treatment of opioid addiction.
The Trial
Titan has been in phase 3 of clinical trials for its implant known as Probuphine. This subdermal implant feeds an anti-addiction medicine called buprenorphine HCl into the bloodstream of patients being weaned off of opioid painkillers.
The double-blind trial took 177 patients who were already taking buprenorphine or naloxone (another common opioid antagonist) for six months and implanted them with Probuphine.
One group received four Probuphine implants and placebo treatments of the drugs they’d already been taking. The other group received placebo implants and real treatments of buprenorphine or naloxone. The patients with the implants had response rates of 96%, while the patients with the pills had response rates of 87%.
In other words, more patients with the Probuphine implants went six months with no evidence of illicit opioid use than those in the other group. This is what is known as a significant result, and it is very important.
The company sees these strong results as a reason to believe the implant could receive FDA approval as early as the first half of 2016.
The Value
When someone overdoses on an opioid, they’re usually killed from respiratory depression.
Think of it this way: When you go to sleep, your breathing slows down, and your bloodstream takes in less oxygen.
When you overdose on an opioid, you fall so deeply asleep that you don’t take in enough oxygen to survive. It’s basically death sleep.
The average adult takes between 16 and 20 breaths per minute. When the body starts taking fewer than 12 breaths per minute, it starts to become oxygen starved, and brain damage and organ failure follow.
Buprenorphine, unlike the other common opioid treatment methadone, is a partial opioid antagonist that creates a ceiling in respiratory depression. While the drug itself causes breathing to slow, it’s been shown to have results that can be controlled to help stop fatal respiratory depression.
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The Epidemic
Opioid abuse is an epidemic, and 11 U.S. states have declared a state of emergency against the class of drugs. In doing this, first responders are given some leeway in the anti-overdose medication they can apply.
In March, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill called the Opioid Overdose Reduction Act of 2015 to protect doctors and physicians who prescribe overdose-reversing drugs such as naloxone.
“We cannot allow the prescription drug epidemic to spread from the emergency room to the courtroom as a result of good Samaritans administering lifesaving drugs like naloxone to prevent overdoses,” Massachusetts senator Ed Markey — the bill’s sponsor — said. “This legislation is an important step to help protect the first responders, volunteers, and family members who are on the front lines of preventing overdoses and working to end the scourge of prescription drug and heroin addiction in Massachusetts and across the country.”
Another bill, known as the Protect Our Infants Act of 2015, seeks to identify the best practices for diagnosing and treating neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is caused by fetal exposure to opiates.
Everybody wants to stop drug overdoses from happening, and with such broad support on the legislative side of things, new developments in the medical and technological arenas have a clear run toward regulatory approval.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
