There is a high level of unmet medical needs in the Osteoarthritis (OA) market such as the lack of disease-modifying OA drugs (DMOADs) and the need for effective analgesics with fewer adverse effects. This provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop new drugs with disease-modifying effects and novel methods of action (MOAs) that are capable of addressing the needs of patients, observes GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Thomas Keller, Healthcare Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The current pharmacological therapies prescribed to patients with OA, focus on symptomatic pain treatment only through the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), opioids, antidepressants, and intraarticular (IA) corticosteroid injections. However, the underlying cause is not addressed and is the most significant gap in the current market.”

Some DMOADs that are currently in late-stage development to address this gap are TissueGene’s Invossa, and Biosplice Therapeutics’s lorecivivint. However, pricing as well as the complexity of OA as a whole joint disease, suggest that this unmet need will not be fully met, leaving ample room for the identification and development of new targets such as anabolic and catabolic pathway enzymes in articular cartilage, mediators of the inflammatory pathway such as prostaglandins, cytokines and chemokines as well as proteases involved in the breakdown of articular cartilage.

Keller continues: “The current analgesics offer inadequate pain relief and are associated with a variety of adverse effects, including indigestion, stomach ulcers, headaches and increased risk of myocardial infarction and stroke. Furthermore, patients’ responses to classical pain therapies is not uniform. As such, there is a significant need for analgesics with improved efficacy and safety profiles.”

There are currently several therapies in development with new modes of delivery or new mechanisms of action that aim to address the need for improved pain relief with better safety profiles, including Regeneron’s fasinumab, Organogenesis Holdings’s ReNu, Bone Therapeutics’s JTA-004, Xalud Therapeutics’s XT-150, and Centrexion Therapeutics’s CNTX-4975.

Keller adds: “A further crucial unmet need in the OA marketplace is the development of therapies for patients with comorbid conditions. The prevalence of OA increases with age and elderly patients are the major target population for OA drugs. Elderly patients are more difficult to treat because they often have various comorbid conditions, such as cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems, limiting the use of conventional therapies.”

New drugs with improved tolerability are being pursued, such as Techfields Pharma’s X-0002, a novel topical NSAID. This will address the needs of some patients, particularly elderly patients which guidelines recommend should be treated using topical instead of oral NSAIDs. However, the patients with varying comorbid conditions will likely require a range of novel therapies to address their specific needs.

Keller concludes: “Overall, GlobalData believes that there are significant unmet needs remaining in the OA marketplace, the most significant of which is the need for novel DMOADs that address the underlying pathophysiology of OA and that there remains a large opportunity for improvement within the marketplace.”