The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
New drug targets migraines
STAMFORD — An estimated 38 million Americans suffer from migraine headaches, causing them to miss work, school and quality time with their friends and families.
Until now, most migraine treatments offered sufferers little to no relief or came with unpleasant side effects, but Dr. Peter McAllister, Medical Director of the New England Institute for Neurology and Headache in Stamford, said a game changer is about to hit the market.
For the past year, McAllister has functioned as the chief investigator on a “double-blind placebo control study” testing a new preventative drug that is designed to target migraines.
“What we’ve been working on is a class of agents called CGRP blockers,” he said. “CGRP (or calcitonin gene related peptide) is a neuropeptide that is released when a migraine is triggered. Think of it as a big inflammatory bad guy in the brain that starts the chemical reaction process that leads to a migraine. So, if you can block CGRP, you can block migraines.”
During the study, half the participants received a monthly injection of this new monoclonal antibodies treatment designed to target the part of the brain where migraines originate, while the other half received a placebo.
“Monoclonal antibodies are basically designer smart drugs that are injected, and they can only go to the area in the body that they are designed to treat,” McAllister said. “So, these CGRP-blocking monoclonal antibodies get injected once a month and they travel through the body, up to the brain, find CGRP and block it, thereby blocking migraine. And the cool thing about these monoclonal antibodies ... is that there are virtually no side effects, and because they can only affect the area they are designed for, there is no risk of off-site toxicity, meaning they can’t affect the liver or the kidneys, or any other area of the body.”
McAllister said the data compiled upon completion of the clinical study showed “about half the
study subjects saw at least a 50 percent reduction in their monthly migraines and approximately onethird saw a 75 to 100 percent reduction.”
Though those who saw a 100 percent reduction in migraines made up only a small number of the test subjects, McAllister said, “We’ve never seen a 100 percent reduction in patients with any of the other preventive migraine medicines.”
Until now, McAllister said there were only two types of treatment available to migraine sufferers: preventative treatments or acute treatment at the headache’s onset.
“Preventives are something that you take either every day, such as a pill, or monthly such as a shot, and that’s supposed to decrease the number of headaches per month and the severity,” he said. “The other class of drugs are the acute therapy, and that’s when you feel a migraine
coming on and you take the medication to make it go away.”
But unlike this new drug, McAllister said those treatments were not originally designed to treat migraines, and many offered little relief and/or came with unpleasant side effects or a risk of off-site toxicity.
“All the other migraine preventive medicines that we’ve ever used have been discovered accidentally,” he said. “For example, if someone was prescribed medicine for high blood pressure and it was discovered that patient’s headaches also got better, then
studies were done and the drug was approved for treatment of migraines. There was a seizure medication that went through the same process after patients reported an improvement in their migraines. Botox too was accidentally discovered when it was used for wrinkles and again patients saw an improvement in their headaches.”
“This is the first and only migraine drug that was designed from scratch to affect the brain to stop migraines,” he said.