Ever imagined a painkiller that only switches on in injured tissue, leaving the rest of the body unaffected? If not, than have a glance into this article, and you may find a perfect remedy for all kinds of pains.
Ray Dingledine of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues have invented a compound named NP-A, that binds to the base of NMDA receptors and stops glutamate and a connected neurotransmitter called NMDA from binding. An insignificant drop in pH can lead to a significant boost in NP-A’s ability to chunk the receptor. For example, a drop in pH from 7.6 to 6.9 causes the compound’s activity to increase 62 fold.
In simple terms, this new class of pH-dependent drugs interfere with nerve signals connected to the brain and spinal cord, but only where the tissue has become slightly acidic owing to injury.
Dingledine stated,
The drugs act by blocking NMDA receptors, which are found on cells throughout the brain and central nervous system. It’s a context-dependent blocking of pain, which is a new strategy for these receptors.
Normal tissue has a pH of around 7.4, but this drops to around 7.0 because the blood supply is disrupted, owing to injury, resulting in the accumulation of waste products such as carbon dioxide and a shift to anaerobic respiration that produces lactic acid. The new drugs act by blocking NMDA receptors found in cells throughout the brain and central nervous system and are concerned in a variety of nerve functions, including pain sensitization.
Even earlier generations of drugs, targeted NMDA receptors, but side effects followed, such as impaired movement or hallucinations, because they act not only on damaged tissue but also on undamaged nerve tissue.
So, people with agonizing peripheral nerve damage, can find a safe heaven in the newly discovered drug that can kill pain without any fear of side effects.
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Via:Newscientist