An On/Off Switch for Chronic Pain?
The protein kinase G (PKG) in human nerve cells acts as a switch for chronic pain which can be turned off, according to a patent application lodged by Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center researchers who are developing a new class of drugs that will block chronic pain by turning this switch off.
Their discovery is published on the website of the journal Neuroscience, and will appear in the publication’s August issue.
None of the existing drugs on the market are adequate to deal with chronic pain according to the researchers. Cox-2 inhibitors like Vioxx carry severe risk of side effects, opioids are highly addictive, Tylenol is ineffective for chronic pain, and other pain drugs cause significant drowsiness, they say.
