New insights into pain mechanisms

感受痛苦是一件好事，因为它说服你保护自己免受危险，并帮助你在受伤后痊愈。但是，有时候，疼痛是没有用的，它会在旧伤愈合后很长一段时间内折磨你。雪上加霜的是，疼痛治疗往往只有部分效果，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。每个人生来就有一个叫做基因的“指导书”“图书馆”，这些指导书描述了如何完成建造心脏等工作。不幸的是，一本书有时会包含一种称为突变的错误；如果这本书描述了一项非常重要的工作，那么这可能会导致疾病。我工作的病人要么感觉不到疼痛，要么有剧痛发作，我试图通过惊人的测序技术寻找突变，这种技术可以快速读取所有约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老鼠身上是如何工作的，来了解该错误是如何导致疾病的，例如疼痛不敏感。这最终可能导致更好的止痛药的开发。

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.