Wow ! A Black Box Warning.........Where can I get a 5 gallon can of this stuff and a straw !
At some point, many patients switch from taking medication by mouth or by injection to a microinfusion pump implanted under the skin that delivers drugs directly into the fluid surrounding the spinal cord.
The idea for the drug came from a snail called the Conus magus that lives in the South Pacific, which paralyzes its victims with venom after capturing them, the company said. Researchers set out learning how to develop a drug based on this venom and eventually copied the amino acid sequence.
Ziconotide: neuronal calcium channel blocker for treating severe chronic pain.
I don't know if they can ever use this class of drugs with an oral route of administration. It's a peptide, i.e. a fragment of protein, that's 25 amino acid residues long. It would start being digested once it's in your gut, IIRC.
Solution structure and backbone dynamics of an -conotoxin precursor