A team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin believe they have found a potential treatment for neuropathic pain. Chemists Stephen Martin and James Sahn say they have discovered a powerful pain reliever that acts on a previously unknown pain pathway. The synthetic compound, known as UKH-1114, is as effective at relieving neuropathic pain in injured mice as gabapentin, they report.
"This opens the door to having a new treatment for neuropathic pain that is not an opioid," said Martin, a professor and the M. June and J. Virgil Waggoner Regents Chair in Chemistry. "And that has huge implications."
The pain drug they found binds to a receptor on cells throughout the central nervous system called the sigma 2 receptor.
Theodore Price, associate professor of neuroscience at The University of Texas at Dallas and a leading expert on chronic pain, tested UKH-1114 on mice with nerve damage and found that it alleviated pain as well as gabapentin did, but at a much lower dose (one-sixth as much) and was effective much longer (lasting for a couple of days, compared with 4 to 6 hours).
Results are published in the August 18 print edition of ACS Chemical Neuroscience. An earlier paper, published online on May 28 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described the molecular cloning and identification of the sigma 2 receptor.