antiquity
01-28-2003, 12:15 AM
Reported January 28, 2003
New Ways to Block Pain
By Shanida Smith, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Some people experience pain so severe that it can't be treated with morphine. Ronald Wiley, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, have just received a grant to continue their studies on a substance they created to help alleviate severe pain.
In an interview with Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Dr. Wiley said: "Narcotics don't normally work well with movement pain, such as pain caused by osteoarthritis.
The hardest to deal with is joint pain." Though progress has been slow, Dr. Wiley's studies of dermorphin-saporin in animals show the toxin enhances the analgesic effect of morphine. The substance targets pain where morphine is not very effective.
Dr. Wiley said, "If it's doing what we think it is, it could put the pain within therapeutic reach."
The purpose of the grant is to find a better way of quantifying the amount of target nerve cells that can be safely killed and to understand what it does to the analgesic portion of morphine, before conducting human trials.
Dr. Wiley also hopes to start human clinical trials on substance P-saporin, which he and his colleagues also created. When injected into the spinal cord of rats, substance P-saporin killed pain-signaling neurons and altered pain responsiveness. Dr. Wiley added, "Everything we've done in animals are encouraging."
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=5315
New Ways to Block Pain
By Shanida Smith, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Some people experience pain so severe that it can't be treated with morphine. Ronald Wiley, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, have just received a grant to continue their studies on a substance they created to help alleviate severe pain.
In an interview with Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Dr. Wiley said: "Narcotics don't normally work well with movement pain, such as pain caused by osteoarthritis.
The hardest to deal with is joint pain." Though progress has been slow, Dr. Wiley's studies of dermorphin-saporin in animals show the toxin enhances the analgesic effect of morphine. The substance targets pain where morphine is not very effective.
Dr. Wiley said, "If it's doing what we think it is, it could put the pain within therapeutic reach."
The purpose of the grant is to find a better way of quantifying the amount of target nerve cells that can be safely killed and to understand what it does to the analgesic portion of morphine, before conducting human trials.
Dr. Wiley also hopes to start human clinical trials on substance P-saporin, which he and his colleagues also created. When injected into the spinal cord of rats, substance P-saporin killed pain-signaling neurons and altered pain responsiveness. Dr. Wiley added, "Everything we've done in animals are encouraging."
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=5315