Purdue Developing Opioid Antagonist of Potential Interest to Comp

Purdue Pharma is developing a long-acting opioid antagonist for treating overdoses that will likely be of interest to the workers’ compensation community, pharmacy benefit manager myMatrixx reports. The drug under development, nalmefene, has a plasma half-life of almost 11 hours, myMatrixx said. The only FDA-approved treatment for opioid overdose, naloxone, has a half-life of about two hours. “As a result, nalmefene has been shown to reverse opioid intoxication for as long as eight hours, whereas naloxone requires monitoring and repeat dosing, as needed,” myMatrixx said. P...