Our Science

Healthcare professionals frequently prescribe more than one therapeutic agent, each with a different mode of action, to address complexity of any given disease. Multi-modal therapy has demonstrated improved outcomes across a range of conditions – including pain – and it is recommended as the standard of care in many therapeutic areas. However, this approach creates a need for multiple prescriptions to combine multiple drugs – increasing the overall cost – and often resulting in an arduous trial and error process, for both physicians and patients, to achieve an optimal ratio with acceptable efficacy and tolerability profile.

Xgene’s proprietary linker technology, tailored to the recognized profiles of specific existing and newly discovered drugs, overcomes the challenges of multimodal drug combination approach and offers potentially better, safer, and more efficient treatments.

Acute and chronic pain conditions, the current clinical focus of Xgene, are prominent in the US and across the globe. Acute pain, that can last for days or few weeks, usually results from a medical procedure or an injury and frequently requires analgesic intervention. Chronic pain, defined as daily pain for more than 3 months, can lead to impaired memory, cognition, and attention, sleep disturbances, reduced physical function, and work absenteeism. Wide-spread use of opioids to treat pain regardless of its origin has led to a declaration of a public health crisis in the US. XG005, a non-opioid dual-acting conjugated prodrug in development in oral and topical formulations, has a potential to greatly reduce if not eliminate the need for use of opioids in many painful conditions.