by Carmie Carpio,Asianjournal .com, Exclusive Stories, July 14, 2007

MAKATI CITY — After years of tedious research, Filipino scientist Dr. Baldomero Olivera and his team at the University of Utah discovered a major breakthrough in pain management. Now, deadly pain might have finally met its match in Ziconotide (trade name Prialt).

The breakthrough research was presented by none other than Olivera himself to doctors, scientists, investors, students and the media gathered at the Filipinas Heritage Museum on July 6. His talk, Turning Killers into Pain Killers, was part of Innovation Forum, a series of bi-monthly forums on various technologies sponsored by the Ayala Foundation and InfoDev.

Seaside Discovery

This major discovery opens a new drug pipeline for pain and other serious diseases. Olivera is among the few scientists who have chosen to tap animal wildlife as a pharmacological source of treatment.

Olivera developed a keen interest in seashells as a young boy in the Philippines. He would gather and bring them home so he could compare them with the diagrams in the pages of his books on marine life.

One particular seashell, the cone snail, became the focus of Olivares and his team. Studying them had been like second nature to Olivares since cone snails are abundant in tropical countries like the Philippines. The team’s curiosity was particularly aroused by the duality of the seashell being exquisite on the outside but highly lethal on the inside. After further research, they found out that the cone snail’s venom which contains conotoxins has an equally antidotal effect. Conotoxins is now being considered to yield new drugs for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorders aside from pain.

Moreover, Olivares’ interest in sea cone snails became instrumental in his discovery of a new pharmaceutical class called conopeptides, the active ingredient in Ziconotide. And in 1992, Olivera’s team was able to determine the analgesic-like qualities of conopeptide. From there, Ziconotide was made available to the public via Prialt.

Non-narcotic Pain Relief

Before Prialt, there was morphine, a highly potent opiate analgesic drug that effectively relieves severe pain. Morphine, however, is a narcotic - a controlled substance and therefore not readily accessible to those who need urgent relief from extreme pain.

Prialt, on the other hand, has none of the habit-forming qualities of morphine. Administered via a spinal pump, patients now have a safer pain-killing alternative. Prialt is believed to be more powerful than morphine. In recent years, Prialt has been the better choice for the treatment or management of pain caused by a variety of diseases such as AIDS, cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s.

The US Food & Drug Administration approved Prialt for severe chronic pain in December 2004. Formerly known as Neurex, it was bought in 1998 by Ireland’s Elan Pharmaceuticals for $700 million. In 2005, sales reached $6.1 million, and then doubled in the succeeding year

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Pathophysiology: Cone shells are carnivorous; they eat other mollusks, worms, or fish. Their habitats extend from shallow, intertidal areas to extreme deepwater areas. Cone shells are predominantly nocturnal, burrowing in the sand and coral during the daytime.

To capture a much faster prey in a highly dynamic marine environment, this relatively slow-moving snail has evolved into one of the fastest known hunters in the animal kingdom, with the average attack lasting only milliseconds. In an attack, the cone shells inject a cocktail of small, rapidly acting paralytic and lethal oligopeptide toxins, each 15-30 residues long, into the prey. Almost 200 different conotoxin peptides have been identified to date. The venom mixture is specific to each cone shell species, containing 30-200 conotoxin peptides. Numerous disulfide bonds determine a specific spatial shape for each toxin. Thirty cases of human envenomation, with occasional fatalities, have been documented worldwide. Human envenomations have involved 18 species of cone shells, including Conus geographus, Conus aulicus, Conus gloria-maris, Conus omaria, Conus striatus, Conus tulipa, and Conus textile.

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