The problem
Unmet medical needs
Three markets where the standard of care is either addictive, exhausted, or absent, and all three run through ion channels.
Chronic pain in the United States
>50M
Americans living with chronic pain.
$635B
Annual economic burden of chronic pain in the U.S.
80%+
Pain prescriptions that are opioid-based, with severe addiction and
overdose risk.
2M+
Opioid use disorder cases in the United States.
The case for a better approach
Pain · $10B+ addressable market
No non-addictive standard of care
- Opioids remain the primary treatment for moderate-to-severe pain.
- Decades of effort have failed to produce a non-addictive, mechanism-selective alternative at scale.
Genetically validated, still undrugged
Human genetics prove the target
- Loss-of-function mutations confer congenital insensitivity to pain in humans: the clearest genetic pain target known.
- Small molecule selectivity against it has proven elusive.
- The target is validated by human biology. The chemistry is the bottleneck.
Antimicrobial resistance
A pipeline running on empty
- The WHO classifies AMR as one of the greatest threats to global health.
- Conventional antibiotic pipelines are depleted; novel scaffolds with new mechanisms of action are urgently needed.
- The global AMR pipeline is critically thin.
Neurological disease · $15B+ ion channel modulator market
Limited disease-modifying options
- Ion channel dysregulation underlies epilepsy, neuropathic pain, and movement disorders.
- Selective, peptide-based modulators offer precision not achievable with small molecules.
One mechanism class, three markets. The same peptide chemistry that can silence a pain
channel selectively is the chemistry that addresses novel antimicrobial scaffolds and
precision neurology, which is why T-Hawk's platform is built around the venom library
rather than around a single indication.