Las Vegas, NV | Oct 2024
Peter Howe and Charlotte Leggett from Clear Scientific attended the 2024 American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Scientific Assembly in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference hosts an environment for physicians to connect, share practice-changing education, and engage in forward-thinking collaboration.
Through physician conversation, it is clear that methamphetamine intoxication has high prevalence across a variety of United States regions. Some physicians in rural regions (i.e., Texas) report as high as 10% of their Emergency Department (ED) admissions involving methamphetamine each day, further straining already limited ED resources.
Patients with methamphetamine intoxication may experience high agitation and/or psychotic states that threaten the safety of themselves, first-responders, emergency department staff, and other patients. This creates a chaotic environment which can compromise patient care. There is no standard of care to reverse methamphetamine intoxication, so sedation is often induced with ketamine and benzodiazepines. Physicians report that if methamphetamine intoxication is severe enough, benzodiazepines could be administered until the patient stops breathing, at which point they must be intubated to avoid mortality.
Patients with methamphetamine intoxication play a critical role in the boarding crisis faced by Emergency Departments across the nation. Sedation and monitoring of meth patients can result in 12 – 72 hours of bed occupancy, and patients are often admitted to a psychiatric unit unnecessarily as there is no way to determine whether psychosis symptoms stem from methamphetamine use or an underlying mental health condition.
Clear Scientific is working diligently to address the methamphetamine and polysubstance crisis with our development of a sequestrant-based therapeutic, CS-1103, which binds directly to the offending toxin, reverses the toxidrome, and accelerates clearance through the urine. There was overwhelming consensus among the emergency healthcare providers surveyed that availability of a sequestrant-based therapeutic like CS-1103 could have a critical, positive impact on safety, quality of care, resource availability, and the overall cost to the hospital systems.
About Clear Scientific
Clear Scientific, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company co-founded by George Whitesides of Harvard University, is pioneering a new paradigm for treatment of conditions and diseases that involve an excess of specific compounds in the body. This approach focuses on development of highly selective, small molecule sequestrants that bind, immediately inactivate, and rapidly clear excess compounds from the body.
For more information, visit https://www.clearsci.com.
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