Pain Therapeutics Awarded $1.5 Million Research Grant by National Institutes of Health

Pain Therapeutics (Nasdaq:PTIE), a clinical-stage drug development company, announced it has been awarded $1.5 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Today’s grant award is intended to support, over the next eighteen months, the Company’s on-going development of new technology to detect Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test.

As quoted in the press release:

“Finding a way to diagnose disease at an early-stage is vitally important,” said Remi Barbier, President & CEO of Pain Therapeutics.  “A blood test may detect Alzheimer’s disease before overt symptoms appear, or rule out other possible causes of memory problems, or might be used as a biomarker to stratify patients for clinical trials, or to measure the efficacy of experimental drugs.”

NIH research grants are paid out in increments based on milestone-based technical progress.  Today’s $1.5 million award is part of a milestone-based research grant previously awarded to Pain Therapeutics by the NIH and announced in September 2017.  The NIH’s National Institute on Aging awarded today’s research grant to Pain Therapeutics following an in-depth evaluation of its technology for scientific and technical merit, and technical progress made to date.

Today’s research grant enables Pain Therapeutics to work collaboratively with leaders in the field to develop a blood-based diagnostic for Alzheimer’s.  The Company’s diagnostic technology is related to PTI-125, the Company’s clinical-stage drug candidate for Alzheimer’s disease, and whose underlying science has been published in Journal of Neuroscience, Neurobiology of Aging, Journal of Biological Chemistry, PLOS-One and other prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Click here to read the full press release.