Use of tanezumab for chronic pain treatment

Abstract

The problem of chronic musculoskeletal pain, the cause of severe suffering and disability of hundreds of millions of people on our planet, is far from being solved. Pain control is particularly difficult in patients with severe forms of osteoarthritis (OA) and chronic non-specific low back pain (CLBP). Popular analgesics – nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and opioids, demonstrate moderate effectiveness and a high risk of adverse events (AE). This leads to the search for new approaches for analgesic therapy. Tanezumab is a monoclonal antibody that specifically blocks nerve growth factor, which plays a key role in the development of chronic pain. A series of phase II and III studies showed that tanezumab was administered intravenously or subcutaneously at a dose of 2.5 mg to 20 mg once every 8 weeks. In patients with OA or CNSLBP, it has a pronounced and persistent analgesic effect that exceeds the effect of placebo, and is equal to or superior to the effect of many months of daily intake of naproxen, celecoxib, diclofenac, oxycodone and tramadol. Tanezumab can cause various AE, primarily rapid progression of OA (in 2.6–6.0%) and neurological disorders (paresthesia and hyposthesia, in ≈5%). At the same time, the progression of OA was significantly more often observed with the combined use of tanezumab and NSAIDs. Nevertheless, taking into account the characteristics of patients who used tanezumab (patients with pain refractory to standard treatment; severe forms of OA), the good analgesic potential of tanezumab allows us to consider it as a promising tool for the control of chronic musculoskeletal pain, which will be widely used in real clinical practice.