New insights into pain mechanisms

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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.