RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. Reports Preclinical Pain Relief for their Non-Opioid Lead GABAkine - Seite 2

The RespireRx team is led by Dr. Arnold Lippa, RespireRx Executive Chairman, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Interim President and Chief Scientific Officer along with RespireRx Senior Research Fellows, Drs. Jeffrey M. Witkin and Rok Cerne and collaborator, Dr. James M. Cook, in addition to their academic affiliations at Ascension St. Vincent and Indiana University/Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, respectively. The team has extensive expertise in drug discovery and development including the development of novel analgesic drugs and an extensive publication record with a combined total of over 1,000 scientific publications. The team has already profiled the activity of KRM-II-81 in a broad range of preclinical studies where it has displayed a high degree of analgesic activity and is excited at the prospect of advancing the Company’s lead GABAkine toward clinical development. In cellular studies, KRM-II-81 preferentially bound to specific subtypes of GABA_A receptors and boosted the ability of GABA to inhibit pain sensory neurons in the spinal dorsal root ganglia. In intact animal models of acute and chronic pain, the analgesic efficacy of KRM-II-81 was comparable to or greater than commonly used analgesics. At the same time, KRM-II-81 did not display side effects such as sedation and motor impairment, but even more importantly, it did not produce tolerance, dependence, respiratory depression, or behavioral changes indicative of abuse liability, which are produced by opioid narcotics and are at the heart of the opioid epidemic.

Unrelated to the NINDS project, KRM-II-81 has also shown very promising results in multiple animal models of treatment resistant epilepsy and in human translational studies where it reduced epileptiform electrical signaling in brain tissue removed from treatment resistant epileptic patients who underwent surgery.

About RespireRx Group

RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. and its subsidiaries and business units (“RespireRx Group”) are discovering and developing medicines for the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders, with a focus on treatments that address conditions affecting millions of people, but for which there are few or poor treatment options, including epilepsy, pain, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (“ADHD”), recovery from spinal cord injury (“SCI”), certain neurological orphan diseases and obstructive sleep apnea (“OSA”). The RespireRx Group is developing a pipeline of new and repurposed drug products based on our broad patent portfolios for two drug platforms: (i) neuromodulators, which include GABAkines and AMPAkines, proprietary chemical entities that positively modulate (positive allosteric modulators or “PAMs”) GABA_A receptors and AMPA-type glutamate receptors, respectively, and (ii) pharmaceutical cannabinoids, which include dronabinol, a synthetic compound that acts upon the nervous system’s endogenous cannabinoid receptors.