Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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.
rest of details here:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2019/march/pioneering-pain-research-leads-to-landmark-deal
(No CBT!)