Tarragona ( Spain), 14 feb ( EFE).-scientific study involving a researcher of the University Rovira i Virgili de Tarragona ( URV) has found a key molecule to detect and treat chronic pain, reported today that academic center of the northeast of Spain.
The study, published in the journal “ Nature Chemical Biology“, was written by a team of scientists which include Dr. Ã’scar Yanes of the URV.
Scientists have discovered, through the metabolomics, that the dimetilesfingosina (DMS) – a small molecule byproduct of degradation of membranes cell of the nervous – system accumulates in the spinal cord in rats experiencing pain neuropathic.
Have also reached the conclusion that the DMS also causes pain when injected into rats that they do not suffer prior pain, which opens doors now inhibition of this molecule and a future development of drugs.
El researcher Ã’scar Yanes, who started work at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego (United States) and completed in the Tarragona URV, explained that it was very difficult to find animal models having chronic pain.
Finally succeeded in two animal models using rats, where four years of research were based.
“We have shown that there is a metabolic pathway in which you can make speeches, since we show a cascade of reactions that in the future can be useful in finding inhibitors,” said Yanes.
In his view, if it could block enzymes that end up generating the DMS, “you could decrease pain”.
And although you have to prove even if the model can be extrapolated to all types of chronic pain, so far we did not know practically nothing at the molecular level of this type of pain, “and this is a first step”, he added.
According to Dr. Yanes, labour can open doors to investigate pain associated with diabetes, for example.
“It will have to watch first – he added – if the results are applicable in humans,” that is needed still discover if the DMS accumulates in human suffering chronic pain “or find an animal model of diabetic mouse to do some research like that has done so far.”
Your idea is to find some of these compounds in the blood of patients with chronic pain.
“We have capacity to find markers, try to quantify pain and give tools to clinicians so that patients do not have to assess the pain that they have with a test,” explained.
And another subject of study, bet, is to discover where the pain comes from: “knowing now the metabolic pathway and compounds that accumulate in the short term should go to search for them in the blood or spinal fluid, which is a simple strategy that develop drugs”, but also is a long-term goal. EFE
