• Curr Opin Anaesthesiol · Oct 2003

    Novel molecular targets in pain control.

    • Andy Dray.
    • AstraZeneca Research & Development Montreal, Canada. andy.dray@astrazeneca.com
    • Curr Opin Anaesthesiol. 2003 Oct 1;16(5):521-5.

    Purpose Of ReviewThe complexity of pain processing in clinical pain conditions and in animal models has revealed many time-related changes and an abundance of molecular drug targets. There continues to be insecurity, however, about new target validation in clinical pain and thus most analgesia development is of high risk for evolving new pain therapies. The present review highlights a number of molecular targets being pursued for pain control.Recent FindingsMany pain targets are critically dependent on the pain model/lesion type. Neural and glial plasticity, ranging from changes in molecular expression and receptor phosphorylation to profound morphological reorganization, has been described under these conditions. Pain modulation has been shown to involve all major families of regulatory proteins such as the G-protein coupled receptors, ion channels, regulatory enzymes, neurotrophins, and kinases, offering an abundance of targets and therapeutic opportunities for symptomatic pain relief.SummaryMany molecular targets have been highlighted with some being the focus of current analgesia research. Some of these (e.g. vanilloid receptor 1, cannabinoid receptor 1, sodium channel NaV 1.8) have been evaluated in animal studies and in preliminary clinical studies, but others are highly novel and riskier analgesia pain targets (e.g. metabotropic glutamate receptors, sensory neurone specific receptors, kinase inhibitors).

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…