Grant aids UAMS meth abuse study

Experimental medication seeks to block rush drug gives

LITTLE ROCK — A drug that has the potential to be the only pharmaceutical treatment for methamphetamine drug abuse will head into a phase two clinical trial at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences after it was awarded a $13.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s drug abuse institute.

The drug, IXT-m200, has demonstrated the ability to reduce or prevent the rush that methamphetamine users get from the drug by keeping it from entering the brain, according to the university. Other trials are examining if it can reverse overdoses similar to how the medicine Narcan treats opioid overdoses.

The new drug uses antibody treatment similar to drugs used for viral diseases including covid-19, Dr. Brooks Gentry, one of the principal investigators for the drug, said Monday.

“There are drugs like this in trials for cocaine and opioids,” said Gentry, a UAMS professor. “Nobody has been approved [for] an antibody or vaccine against stimulants or opioids of any kind.”

The university has at least three to four years of research before the drug could hit the market, Gentry said. To receive Federal Drug Administration approval, the drug would also have to pass a much-larger third-phase trial, he said. A first phase was completed in 2013.

Gentry said he’s been working on the research since the 1990s, at a time when Arkansas was leading the nation in methamphetamine labs per capita.

Methamphetamine labs reduced drastically in the state after multiple laws were passed from 2005 to 2011 that restricted how pseudoephedrine was sold. This included Act 588 of 2011, which required pharmacists to make “a professional determination” whether a patient needed pseudoephedrine, according to previous reporting from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The drug still found its way into the state via South American and Mexican super-labs.

Methamphetamine was the deadliest drug in Arkansas until 2020, when fentanyl passed it, Arkansas Drug Director Kirk Lane previously told the Democrat-Gazette. Some of the fentanyl deaths could have involved methamphetamine, as the two are sometimes mixed, he said.

About 515 people died of methamphetamine overdoses in Arkansas in 2020, a heightened year nationally amid the covid-19 pandemic, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. About 363 people died in 2019.

Kayla Wilson, admissions director for Natural State Recovery Centers, said methamphetamine remains one of the top addictions that the center tackles.

“While the opioid addiction has been catastrophic, we see more meth addicts in our clinics,” Wilson said.

Recovery from the drug can be difficult because it shoots dopamine to extreme levels, she said.

“The receptors are so blasted because people are up for days. It is hard for them to feel normal coming off that drug,” Wilson said. “They feel like they are depressed at what we would see as normal dopamine levels.”

The addiction can induce higher levels of psychosis in addicts than other drugs, Wilson added. She said this can be very hard for family and friends helping the addict.

“You can only imagine that impact on the loved ones when the person they love is seeing people who aren’t there or talking to shadow people,” Wilson said.

Methamphetamine users face an extra battle because there aren’t drugs to help with the addiction, Wilson said.

“They hear about these drug options for opioids, but they don’t have anything for meth addicts,” Wilson said.

This is what Gentry is working to correct.

“I have done a lot of things in my career, but this has been what has kept me going,” Gentry said. “Seeing this through to the end is what I really want to do. We want to help, and there is nothing out there right now.”

Gentry said the medicine won’t work in isolation. Talk therapy along with the drug will be needed to give people the best hope of beating an addiction, he said.

“It gives them a chance that they have not had,” Gentry said.

The study is being conducted through a university startup — InterveXion Therapeutics, based in Little Rock — and will be funded for three years through the recent grant. A trial, specifically to reverse overdoses, was awarded an $8.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2020.