While effective drugs against chronic pain are not just around the corner, researchers have succeeded in identifying a protein as a future potential target for medicinal drugs. Basic research shows that blocking a protein named sortilin prevents pain — initially in laboratory mice.

The results are based on a decade of basic research, and even though studies on mice have only been done so far, the study provides hope for the development of a medicine that can help people with pain induced by nerve injury — called neuropathic pain by medical professionals.

This pain may be triggered by an acute injury or a chronic disease such as e.g. diabetes in the pain pathways and is characterised by different sensations including burning, pricking, stinging, tingling, freezing or stabbing in a chronic and disabling way.

The patients have in common that they could fill a shopping basket with pain killers ranging from local anaesthetic ointments to morphine «without ever really getting any good results» as the primary author of the article, Assistant Professor Mette Richner, puts it. She is employed at the Department of Biomedicine and the DANDRITE research centre, both part of Aarhus University, Denmark.

Mette Richner explains that chronic pain is triggered by overactive nerve cells, i.e. nerve cells where the regulation of their activity is not working properly. For this reason, it is necessary to gain knowledge of the changes happening at the molecular level to be able to ‘nudge things into place again’.

«And it’s here, at the molecular level, that we’ve now added a crucial piece to a larger puzzle,» says Mette Richner, who explains that sortilin — and now things get a little convoluted — appears to ‘put the brakes on the brake’ which, at the molecular level, stops the body’s pain development.

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Materials provided by Aarhus University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.