Body's own drug to tackle pain

A new collaborative study from the laboratories of Nikita Gamper (University of Leeds), Xiaona Du (Hebei Medical University) and Temugin Berta (University of Cincinnati) has uncovered a novel peripheral mechanism of pain processing. The team discovered that our body uses its own version of benzodiazepine-like drugs to control some types of pain. Benzodiazepines are a class of depressant drugs that are used as a sleeping aid and for the treatment of anxiety and epileptic seizures. The new study found that non-neuronal cells residing in the spinal ganglia of peripheral nerves can release a peptide, that works with the same principle as benzodiazepines. Yet, because this process is very localised to the nerve itself, it does not cause the whole nervous system to ‘go to sleep’ but only the nerve that experiences a painful episode. This is a new way in which the body can tune itself, which controls how much pain we feel. The Gamper group believes that these findings may help design better pain treatments to locally target only the affected nerves and therefore prevent side effects in the brain. This would indeed be a huge breakthrough because the main drawback of the major current analgesics, such as opioids, is that they act in the brain and affect not only pain, but other brain functions. The most common ‘side-effect’ is addiction. Re-tuning a ‘painful’ nerve should not be liable to such side-effects.