Ep. 263, Chapter 3: The Economics of Pain Management With Hernan Bazan, M.D.

22:34 – 33:30

South Rampart Pharma operates with a lean business model, prioritizing R&D over large, costly operations. The company is raising an $8 million Series A to efficiently advance its lead drug candidate, SRP-001. The lean model also includes a team of fractional employees and consultants rather than full-time salaried staff. Additionally, the company focuses on a single pipeline, acute nociceptive pain, enabling them to execute a more efficient and less-dilutive Phase 2 trial. These strategies drive operational flexibility and ensure all resources are directed toward moving the technology forward.

Although generic opioids are cheap and widely available, Dr. Bazan highlights a significant market appetite for non-opioid alternatives, citing the success of a drug from Vertex Pharmaceuticals. While Vertex's drug works on peripheral nerves, SRP-001 crosses the blood-brain barrier and functions by producing a metabolite called AM-4-OC, the same active ingredient in acetaminophen, but without the liver toxicity. This provides SRP-001 with a much wider therapeutic index. Dr. Bazan believes the future of pain management will be multimodal, combining multiple effective drugs with different mechanisms of action to reduce the need for addictive opioids.