Where Are All the New Anti-Craving Drugs?

The dilemma of dwindling drug development. Drugs for the treatment of addiction are now a fact of life. For alcoholism alone, the medications legally available by prescription include disulfiram (Antabuse), naltrexone (Revia and Vivitrol)—and acamprosate (Campral), the most recent FDA-approved entry. A fourth entry, topiramate (Topamax), is currently only approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other uses. But none of these are miracle medications, and more to the point, no bright new stars have come through the FDA pipeline for a long time. New approvals for drugs in this category, like psychiatric drugs in general, have lately been confined to repurposed, “me-too” medications—which, insurance companies complain, are far too expensive. As health insurance giant Cigna explains on its website: “If anticraving medications are not covered by your insurance plan, keep in mind that the price of anticraving medications is usually small compared to the cost of alcohol and/or other drugs.” Perhaps so, but evidently not small enough for the expense to be routinely covered by the prescription portion of insurance policies. Federal health officials have the same complaints. In a 2004 report entitled “Innovation or Stagnation: Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration called for increased public-private collaboration and a “critical development path that leads from scientific disco...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs