Researchers Are Developing Cure for Human Pain (neurosciencenews.com)

transporter_ii writes: Scientists from University College London seem to have come up with a two-pronged treatment regimen they believe would help patients suffering from chronic pain. And in a strange irony, they did it by making it possible for mice – and one human – to feel pain when they previously couldn't. From the story: "To examine if opioids were important for painlessness, the researchers gave naloxone, an opioid blocker, to mice lacking Nav1.7 and found that they became able to feel pain. They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life. 'After a decade of rather disappointing drug trials, we now have confirmation that Nav1.7 really is a key element in human pain,' says senior author Professor John Wood (UCL Medicine). 'The secret ingredient turned out to be good old-fashioned opioid peptides, and we have now filed a patent for combining low dose opioids with Nav1.7 blockers. This should replicate the painlessness experienced by people with rare mutations, and we have already successfully tested this approach in unmodified mice.'"

Comments

Too late for some.

[AutodidactLabrat]

Ever watch a Cancer patient die?
I have. I listened to her cry, and whimper, and finally scream until she had to be sedated into unconsciousness with morphine and I mean a LOT of it.
If this just DELAYS that final dosing, it would add weeks or months of enjoyable life to those who are dying of such agony.
Patented? GOOD! Maybe this time the patent rights will be granted to competing entities, allowing for some competition.
Since these are British researchers, we can so hope, they aren't quite as corrupted as our government funded research.

Re:"Just a Flesh Wound"

[davester666]

The problem is, pain is remarkably important to humans. It tells us we are too close to the fire, or our finger is broken, or someone has just plunged a knife in our back.

Sure, there are some people who are constantly in pain that this could held with, and you want some pain relief while you are healing, but even when healing, you don't want the possibility of pain gone [ie, broken arm, you get up to go to the washroom and stub your foot, breaking your toe, you want to find out right then it's broken, not later when doctor tells you to just live with it like that.