Remedies to help people fall asleep have been around for centuries, from laudanum in the 1800s to barbiturates more recently. “Unfortunately, most of them were addictive and potentially deadly,” said Dr. David Neubauer, associate director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “The history of sleep medications is really a tale of improving safety.”

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, more than 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders. This week, the sleep industry’s biggest convention of the year drew some 5,400 medical experts and sales reps to Minneapolis. That’s about 10 times the number who came in 1990, when the city last hosted the event.

Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., had listed gaboxadol as one of three drug applications it planned to file this year, and called the termination “clearly disappointing.” As recently as two years ago, some Merck scientists had viewed the product as a potential blockbuster, possibly safer and as effective as sleeping medications currently on the market.

Researchers studying a disease that causes people to suddenly drop off to sleep are trying to turn what they have learned into a new way to help insomniacs get some shut-eye.
They found that blocking brain receptors for orexin, a blood peptide, promoted sleep in rats, dogs and people, according to a paper in Sunday’s online […]

VEC-162 is designed to treat patients with circadian rhythm sleep disorders, or CRSD. These are people such as shift workers whose internal sleep/wake cycle does not match their desired sleep time.

Modafinil is proving clinically useful in the treatment of narcolepsy, a neurological disorder marked by uncontrollable attacks of daytime sleepiness.

Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep.

It also suggests that, unlike Ambien, gaboxadol doesn’t trigger sleep by the blunt ‘on/off’ mechanism of synaptic inhibition.

There were no serious adverse events and no consistent next-day residual effects seen with gaboxadol.

San Diego-based Neurocrine Biosciences also stated that it had received an approvable letter from the FDA on the 5mg and 10mg capsules, while its 15mg extendable release tablets were rejected.