New insights into pain mechanisms

对疼痛机制的新见解

• 批准号: G1100340/1
• 负责人: James Cox
• 金额: $ 150.81万
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2011 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=G1100340%2F1
• 关键词: New; insights; into; pain; mechanisms

To feel pain is a good thing because it persuades you to protect yourself from danger and it helps you to heal after hurting a part of your body. But, sometimes, pain is not useful and it can torment you long after an old injury has healed. To add to the misery, pain treatments are often only partially effective with side effects being common. My work aims to help us to better understand and treat pain. Everyone is born with a ‘library‘ of ‘instruction books‘ called genes, which describe how to carry out jobs such as building a heart. Unfortunately, a book can sometimes contain an error called a mutation; and if the book describes a very important job, then this can result in a disease. I work with patients who either can‘t feel pain or who have episodes of excruciating pain and I try to find mutations by using amazing sequencing technology, which can rapidly read all ~23000 human genes. Once a mutation has been found I can learn how the error causes disease, e.g. pain insensitivity, by looking at how the comparable gene works in mice. This can, ultimately, lead to the development of better pain-killing drugs.

感觉到疼痛是一件好事，因为它说服你保护自己免受危险，并帮助你在伤害身体的一部分后愈合。但是，有时候，疼痛是没有用的，它可以折磨你很长一段时间后，旧伤愈合。更糟糕的是，疼痛治疗通常只有部分有效，副作用很常见。我的工作旨在帮助我们更好地理解和治疗疼痛。每个人出生时都有一个“图书馆”，里面有一本叫做基因的“指导书”，描述了如何进行诸如建造心脏之类的工作。不幸的是，一本书有时会包含一个叫做突变的错误;如果这本书描述了一个非常重要的工作，那么这可能会导致疾病。我的病人要么感觉不到疼痛，要么有剧烈疼痛的发作，我试图通过使用惊人的测序技术来寻找突变，这种技术可以快速读取所有~23000个人类基因。一旦发现突变，我就可以通过观察类似基因在小鼠中的作用来了解错误是如何导致疾病的，例如疼痛不敏感。这最终可以导致更好的止痛药的开发。