Pioneering pain research leads to landmark deal - KCL 2019

Sly Saint · Mar 14, 2019

King’s College London and Wellcome today announce an agreement with the pharmaceutical company MSD (tradename of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA). The collaboration and licence deal, made possible by the pioneering work of Professor Peter McNaughton from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s, could lead to a new class of pain medications.

New medications for managing chronic pain are urgently needed. Current pain drugs are effective at relieving short-term pain but are much less effective for ongoing chronic pain and there is a risk of side-effects when taken at high doses over time. Chronic neuropathic pain, which is caused by nerve damage from traumatic injury or illness, is a particular problem and there are no truly effective treatment options. As many as one in four people with diabetes suffers from neuropathic pain.

Professor McNaughton’s lab in the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at the IoPPN has uncovered a fundamental biological mechanism underlying neuropathic pain, building on his 2011 discovery, while at the University of Cambridge, that identified the importance of the protein HCN2 in chronic pain. HCN2 can cause a continuous sensation of pain through the initiation of electrical signals in pain-sensitive nerve fibres, and research at King’s has shown that blocking the activity of HCN2 in animal models can deliver effective pain relief without side effects.
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rest of details here:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2019/march/pioneering-pain-research-leads-to-landmark-deal

(No CBT!)

Snowdrop · Mar 14, 2019

FWIW: Information on the HCN2 protein being discussed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCN2

Looks interesting. Ion channel signalling is mentioned. Not that I know anything at all about that but have seen mentioned here.

duncan · Mar 14, 2019

Snowdrop said: ↑

Ion channel signalling is mentioned.
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Ion channel signalling seems to be one of the few new medical frontiers. I think it's great more and more researchers are looking. I think it's appalling so little is known. To be fair, you need money to do research, and to get money earmarked you need a critical mass of interest.

shak8 · Mar 15, 2019

Whether the compound(s) that will be developed will be effective (note how much the FDA-approved fibro drugs were over-hyped by the medical community for years before the real-life, rather poor efficacy was teased out) will remain to be seen.

I'm not a fan of the one-shot, "take this magic pill" approach.

Yet, the basic research is a good idea.

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Pioneering pain research leads to landmark deal - KCL 2019

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