Switching off Pain at the Source: Is This The End For Opioid Pain Relief?

Abstract

Opiates, like morphine or codeine, are used to suppress nociceptive pain in humans. While these drugs can provide effective pain relief, they also cause an extensive array of undesirable side effects, including central depression, sedation and addiction. Relatively recently, the sodium channel Nav1.7 was shown to be essential for pain perception in humans. Based on this, we describe a new technical approach that may be useful for the prolonged suppression of nociceptive pain. The technique uses a harmless adeno-associated virus carrying a short hairpin RNA to silence Nav1.7 ion channels only in sensory neurons underlying pain perception. The major advantage is that pain may be suppressed at the source for many months, without the side effects of opiates.

KEYWORDS:

• adeno-associated virus
• dorsal root ganglia
• nociceptive pain
• opiates
• short hairpin RNA

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The experiments carried out in this study were funded by a grant to NJ Spencer (grant # 1067335) from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH & MRC) of Australia. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The experiments carried out in this study were funded by a grant to NJ Spencer (grant # 1067335) from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH & MRC) of Australia. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed. No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.