Diamyd Medical has acquired an exclusive license for Endomorphin technology that may be used for the treatment of pain, including neuropathic pain in diabetes.

"In addition to this newly acquired Endomorphin technology, and our exclusive licenses for GAD, we also have an ongoing clinical development programme with Enkephalin," said Elisabeth Lindner, president and CEO of Diamyd Medical. With Enkephalin, GAD and Endomorphin, we have completed our pain portfolio now having products targeting all three major pain receptors. This gives us a strong position in the development of products for multiple pain types, including neuropathic pain that alone has a market potential estimated to more than 3.5 billion dollars."

The Endomorphin technology embodies a direct production and release of Endomorfin peptides with morphine-like activity directly into the spinal cord blocking further pain signal generation. Morphine has been used for centuries to provide pain relief and continues to be an essential tool in modern clinical pain management. However, in addition to pain relief, Morphine produces a host of undesirable side effects.

"The newly licensed technology allows focal delivery of Endomorphin directly to the site of pain using our NTDDS (Nerve Targeting Drug Delivery system) platform. The localized Endomorphin delivery is not expected to have side effects like systemic Morphine," states Darren Wolfe, president of Diamyd.

Diamyd Inc, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, is a fully owned subsidiary of Diamyd Medical and is a leader in the field of drug delivery to the nervous system.

The Endomorphin technology has been the subject to two peer-reviewed publications including; 'Engineering an Endomorphin-2 gene for use in neuropathic pain therapy' in Pain, 2007, 133:29-38 and 'Effects of transgene-mediated Endomorphin-2 in inflammatory pain' in Eur J Pain, 2008 Epub.

Diamyd Medical is a Swedish biopharmaceutical company focusing on development of pharmaceuticals for treatment of autoimmune diabetes and its complications.