PainCeptor Pharma
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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Pharmaceutical |
| Predecessor | Antalium and NeuroCeptor through merger |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | Montreal, Quebec[1] , Canada |
Key people | Louis Lamontagne (President, 2004- )[1][2] |
Number of employees | 45 (2007)[1] |
PainCeptor Pharma is a private Canadian company focused on the development of drugs that act outside the central nervous system on nociceptors to treat pain.[3] The company was established in 2004 through the merger of two academic spinout firms: Antalium from McGill University and NeuroCeptor from Queens University.[4][5] At its inception, the company's primary operations were in Montreal and Kingston,[5] and it established a partnership with the Danish company NeuroSearch as part of its birth.[2]
The company's strategic focus was on peripheral rather than central-acting therapeutics is an attempt to avoid the known side effects of existing central-acting agents.[6] The primary molecular targets addressed by PainCeptor are members of the ASIC ion channel family and nerve growth factor (NGF) and NGF receptors.[6] In 2006, the company secured funding from the Canadian Industrial Research Assistance Program.[7] In 2007, the company raised C$24.4 million in venture capital funding in anticipation of starting first-in-man clinical trials that year; an initial round of funding had been secured in 2004 in the amount of C$23 million.[1][2] As of 2007, the company conducted research out of the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences, a facility of Canada's National Research Council located in Ottawa, Quebec.[1]
Although PainCeptor refers to itself as a biopharmaceutical company on its website,[3] its two primary publicly reported drug discovery projects aim to deliver small molecule therapeutics.[6] According to AdisInsight, a drug information platform published by Springer Nature, the small-molecule antagonists program discontinued in 2009;[8] while development of a separate drug, PPC-5650 (an ASIC channel antagonist) had been discontinued by 2016.[9]