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Sea Snail Toxin Offers Promise For Pain
Khyber writes to tell us about research out of Australia that holds out hope for chronic pain sufferers. The toxin of a sea snail, called conotoxin, has a component that has been shown to directly target pain receptors in experimental animals. Unlike essentially all existing pain relievers, conotoxin seems to suppress pain without side effects. Human trials are a year away.
"Human trials are a year away. "
Hopefully they will not patent it.
This could be great for people like me. I suffered a lower-lumbar spinal fracture almost seven months ago. The doctors tell me that, essentially, I have to deal with chronic neck and lower back pain for the rest of my life. I take opiate-based pain medicine twice a day for it. The stuff wigs me out sometimes, though, and I slog through the day in somewhat of a fog. Not good for a college student. Hopefully this will make it to the market, and I can finally get some pain relief without getting "high".
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=1104
and if you have the chops to read the study, here is a link to the abstract7 030
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/45/1
looks like the full text is free (unless my institution's IP range has a subscriptionn and it would otherwise be locked down)
I recently saw a very cool lecture by Baldomero Olivera, one of the people who discovered these compounds in cone snail venom. Apparently back in the day, they were trying to find the compound in cone snail toxin because it was terribly toxic and a lot of people in the Phillipines died from stepping on snails. So they took some cone snail toxin, fractionated it and then injected individual fractions into mice, expecting to see a single fraction that contained the "toxin" compound of interest. Instead, when they did the experiment they found that a large number of fractions had all kinds of crazy effects on the mice, including behavioral and motor effects. What they discovered was that there are a large number of compounds that make up the cone snail venom, each had a slightly different role in capturing prey. Some worked as short term paralysis agents that allowed the snail to capture its prey while others worked long term and allowed the snail to slowly eat its prey whole. There were also some that had overlapping function, but appeared to work better against different types of prey. Very cool talk considering it was about Cone Snails.
And the guy several posts above who broke his back and has been told by his doctor that he will suffer from chronic pain for the rest of his life? Should we not research medications to ease his pain, so he can better figure out why his back hurts? (Hint: It hurts because he broke it.)
Just because your chronic pain is self-induced, it doesn't mean all people's pain is so caused.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Prialt has a few caveats.
Be nice if they could find something better than morphine though. I've been on drips twice in my life. (Yeah, I guess I'm accident prone.) Anyway, 1) it's not so much pain relief as much as "I'm so euphoric that I don't care that my arm hurts like a bitch," especially for something like getting a wound scrubbed out with a Brillo pad, 2) the side effects suck and 3) coming down is like the worst hangover you've ever had, only worse. Even thinking about it right now makes me nauseous.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
These things are very pretty and very deadly as well.
...etc and all was good. When they unzipped the wet suit, a live cone shell fell off. What seemed to have happened is that she saw this pretty shell and did not know it was toxic. She just decided to keep it safe and unzipped the suit and tucked it in.
The proper name for them is not "sea snails" (there are lots of snails in the sea). The are called cone shells or cone snails. See the Wikipedia article on them.
I used to see them when snorkeling in the Red Sea. They are one of the few snails that are "clean" since they have a mantle withdrawn over the shell and hence algae and barnacles do not attach to it. The other snail that does that is the cowrie shell. If you find a dirty shell, then it is because the animal inside it has died, and the algae has move on it.
The cone shells are very very toxic and as far as I recall have no antidote. They have a harpoon like needle that injects venom, and a proboscis to swallow prey with.
One true horror story from Sinai in Egypt was about a woman tourist who was found dead under the water after scuba diving. They took the body out and checked the regulator, the air supply,
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Scientific American had it too: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000D45AD-46FB-1237-81CB83414B7FFE9F
April 2005 issue
INNOVATION
A Toxin against Pain
For years, scientists have promised a new wave of drugs derived from sea life. A recently approved analgesic that is a synthetic version of a snail toxin has become one of the first marine pharmaceuticals
thegodmovie.com - watch it