White House To Loosen Controls On Heroin Addiction Treatment

The Wall Street Journal recently reported President Obama’s administration will loosen its strict controls on a medication called buprenorphine, which is used to treat addiction to heroin and other opioid-based drugs.

The Department of Health and Human Services up until now only allowed doctors to prescribe the medication to 100 patients at a time. Under the new rules, up to 275 patients at a time can be prescribed the drug. The limits were designed to restrict access to the substance, which addicts sometimes trade on the black market to opioid abusers seeking to avoid painful withdrawal symptoms. An unintended consequence to the tight controls became the inability/difficulties of finding a legal way to obtain the medicine from a doctor.

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This could spell good news for companies like Titan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. TTNP and BioDelivery Sciences International, Inc. BDSI, two companies that have been working on an injectable form of buprenorphine.

Titan recently received approval from the FDA for the first injectable implant in the United States, which will deliver a dosage of the medicine to patients, especially those who find methadone to be too addicting.

Shares of both Titan and BioDelivery over the last month have spiked but fallen to remain pretty much flat; however, this news may be a catalyst for these two pharmaceuticals.