The All-New Pain Therapy That “Switches Off Pain” Without Addiction

When it comes to painkilling medications, they can generally be categorized into two broad kinds:

• non-opioids (e.g. ibuprofen, paracetamol/acetaminophen, aspirin)
• ones that actually work for something more serious than a headache

That’s an oversimplification of course, but as a strong general rule, when there is serious painkilling to be done, that’s when doctors consider it’s time to break out the opioids.

Nor are all opioids created equal—there’s a noteworthy difference between codeine and morphine, for instance—but the problems of opioids are typically the same (tolerance, addiction, and eventual likelihood of overdose when one tries to take enough to make it work after developing a tolerance), and it becomes simply a matter of degree.

See also: I’ve been given opioids after surgery to take at home. What do I need to know?

But what if we’d like those benefits, without the tolerance, ease of addiction, and possibility of overdose?

The genetic advantage

Researchers (Dr. Corinna Oswell et al.) developed a targeted gene therapy that reduces pain by acting directly on specific brain circuits instead of broadly affecting the entire brain like opioids do.

In other words: this gene therapy reproduces pain relief without activating addiction-related brain pathways or dulling normal sensations.

Specifically, the therapy makes use of a brain-specific “off switch”, which dampens pain signals in the anterior cingulate cortex (a key brain area involved in the experience of pain). This way, it can target opioid-sensitive neurons and alter their activity, effectively recreating the beneficial effects of opioids at a circuit level, without having the usual adverse effects associated with opioids on the systemic level.

If you’re wondering how soon you can get it, that bad news is that the therapy is still in preclinical research, and further studies are needed before human clinical trials can confirm safety and effectiveness.

But it’s very promising so far; in animal models, the treatment provided sustained pain relief and reversed abnormal brain activity linked to chronic pain without impairing reflexes or sensory detection.

You can find the paper itself, here: Mimicking opioid analgesia in cortical pain circuits

So, how rapidly is science advancing? Well, this research comes a little more than a year after, a different team of scientists were pioneering a potential gene therapy for pain, with results that were very promising at the time, but not a patch on what we’ve been talking about today:

Structure-guided design of a peripherally restricted chemogenetic system

…which you can read about in pop-science terms (with diagrams!) here:

New gene therapy could alleviate chronic pain, researchers find

So… Pretty quickly, but we always love to see new advances!

Want to learn more?

If you’re looking for alternatives while you wait, we’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:

• Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
• How To Stop Pain Spreading
• How To Dial Down Your Pain
• Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
• Get The Right Help For Your Pain
• The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
• Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)

Take care!