News You Can Use | Chillies are helping migraine research

Chilli peppers and migraines have traits in common, a fact scientists are exploiting to develop drugs capable of preventing the debilitating headache’s painful symptoms before an attack. The link between how skin reacts when rubbed with chilli oil and what happens in the brain during a migraine has attracted the world’s largest biotechnology company, Amgen Inc., US, and other companies seeking to create medicines for migraines.

Migraines are an extremely common disorder, and affect people really in the prime of their lives, Rob Lenz, who is leading Amgen’s migraine drug development, said in an interview. Still, no drugs have been developed specifically for the treatment of migraines, he says. They were developed as anti-epileptics, or blood pressure lowering agents.

That may soon change. Amgen, based in California, and other biotechnology companies such as Alder Biopharmaceuticals Inc., are targeting a chemical released during a migraine that carries a pain signal from nerve to nerve. By blocking a receptor from receiving the message, these companies aim to create drugs that cut off developing migraines before the symptoms start. Similar pain-signal transmission occurs when chilli oil touches the skin. In that situation, the capsaicin in the pepper causes the body to release calcitonin gene-related peptides, or CGRP, leading to an increase in blood flow to the affected area. To show the Amgen drug works, researchers injected it under the skin of patients who had chilli oil on their skin. The therapy blocked the CGRP that causes increased blood flow.

The new class of drugs under development are biologics, often delivered by injection, and are more complex, targeted and longer-lasting in the body than the earlier failed attempts, Lenz says.

Currently, the most popular migraine treatments are oral drugs called triptans, first introduced in the 1990s, which constrict blood vessels in the brain to relieve swelling and pain. Those medicines attempt to halt migraines once they begin. The new therapies aim to eliminate the need to wait for attacks to occur, says John Latham, chief scientific officer at Alder.

Once the migraine symptoms flare, it’s very hard to resolve them, and most at that stage of the game let it run its course, Latham said in a phone interview. That’s why the new pain blocker approach holds so much promise. By blocking a receptor in the brain from receiving the message, migraines could be avoided completely, says Peter Goadsby, director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Headache Center. Goadsby helped discover CGRP’s connection to migraines and has consulted with drug companies working on developing his findings into medicines.

What these antibody approaches hope to do is to either block the receptor or mop up the CGRP itself, he says. BLOOMBERG