NAVEGA THERAPEUTICS

Navega Therapeutics is a preclinical stage company pursuing a radically different approach to treat chronic pain and tackle the opioid epidemic. At Navega, we have developed a novel gene therapy to treat severe chronic pain that is non-addictive, highly specific, and long lasting. We were inspired by nature: there are humans that have a mutation in their genome that feel no pain whatsoever. We have imitated this process by developing a novel gene therapy to target pain in a non-addictive way. I... n our proof of concept, we demonstrated that the mice that received our therapy have an increased pain tolerance and lower pain levels during weeks. We validated our approach in three preclinical animal models: inflammatory pain, chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain and BzATP-induced pain. We also have safety studies demonstrating that our therapy has no neurological, motor, or olfactory side-effects. We have been awarded two SBIR grants, one from the National Cancer Institute and another one from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and licensed three patents from UCSD.More