Tonabersat – a new kind of migraine drug

Back in early 2006 I wrote about a new class of migraine drugs that was in the testing phases.  It’s called a gap junction blocker, and the drug being tested is called tonabersat.  It’s time for an update!

A major phase of the clinical trials have been completed for tonabersat.  The results were encouraging, and reason enough to continue to testing.

At the end of a three month treatment, patients had a 50% better improvement than those on a placebo.  Patients also were able to significantly cut down on the amount of abortives that they were taking (ie painkillers).  In the third month of the study, they took on average 60% less of these other medications.

This is really still in the early testing stages, meaning that there’s still a lot of work to be done to find the best dosages and so forth.  So there’s reason to be optimistic that there will be more significant improvement in future trials.

The research is being continued at the Danish Headache Center under founder Dr. Jes Olesen.  For more, visit the Minister Pharmaceuticals page on Tonabersat.