Racing to Replace Opioids, Biopharma Is Betting on Pain Drugs with a Checkered Past

January 31, 2018

(STAT News) – It was supposed to be a $10 billion idea, one that would help wean the world off its opioid dependence and give the drug industry a bounty of lucrative new products. But the bottom fell out for a new class of pain medicines, called NGF inhibitors, when patients in clinical trials starting inexplicably blowing out their joints. The Food and Drug Administration put a halt to further studies in 2010, and a bunch of once-transformational drugs suddenly looked like costly scientific mistakes.