Recent strategies for drug development in fibromyalgia syndrome

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved 3 medications for treating fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). There have been no additional FDA approvals since January 2009 and the efficacy of the FDA-approved medications for FMS has been questioned.

Areas covered: The “search for studies” tool using clinicaltrials.gov and PubMed were employed. The term, “fibromyalgia” was used for clinicaltrials.gov. The terms employed for PubMed were “Name-of-Drug Fibromyalgia”, “Fibromyalgia Treatment” or “Fibromyalgia Drug Treatment.” Clinical trials were reviewed if they were prospective and blinded, and if they employed a comparator, either placebo or another pharmaceutical.

Expert commentary: Progress toward standardizing the outcome measures for FMS clinical trials have been made but challenges remain. Several pharmaceutical candidates for FMS have been tested since 2009. The results of these studies with potential novel targets for drug development for FMS were reviewed including the results of trials with sodium oxybate, quetiapine, esreboxetine, nabilone, memantine, naltrexone, and melatonin.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• cognition
• depression
• fatigue
• fibromyalgia

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.