Without morphine, opioids and addiction
Biologists have created a drug that makes chemotherapy painless
Chemists and biologists from the University of San Diego have created a drug that blocks all the pain that occurs after a course of chemotherapy, and does not cause dependence, like opiates. The first results of its verification were published in the journal Cell Reports (Woller et al., Inhibition of Neuroinflammation by AIBP: Spinal Effects upon Facilitated Pain States).
"Opiates and other painkillers do not "turn off" the pain, but simply muffle it. At the same time, they weaken the feeling of pleasure, which leads to the development of addiction. We were able to change the work of the system itself responsible for the transmission of pain signals, and not just disguised its symptoms," said Tony Yaksh from the University of California at San Diego (in the press release Single Injection Allows Chemotherapy Pain for Months in Mice – VM).
Chemotherapy, with which doctors destroy cancerous tumors, works in two ways – damaging the DNA of cancer cells, forcing them to self-destruct or preventing their growth and division. The second method is becoming more popular today, since it does not lead to the appearance of even more aggressive types of cancer cells due to the development of new mutations in their genome.
Both types of chemotherapy have one common and extremely unpleasant side effect. The mass death of cancer and healthy cells puts the immune system in a "state of emergency", which generates a huge number of inflammations in the body, including in the vicinity of nerve endings, and causes a lot of painful sensations that often become unbearable for patients.
Yaksh and his colleagues actually accidentally figured out how to completely suppress this pain using the resources of the human body itself, studying the work of the TLR4 receptor, one of the toll-like receptors – components of the innate immune system of humans and animals.
In a healthy body, these outgrowths on the cell surface play an important role – they pick up chemical signals indicating tissue damage and the appearance of certain bacteria inside the body. When such signs appear, they cause an inflammatory reaction, "luring" immune cells into the damaged area.
Disorders in the work of these receptors, as Yuri Miller, a colleague of Yaksha, says, may be associated with the development of atherosclerosis and other diseases of the arteries. Guided by this idea, Miller and his team tried to prevent the "overgrowth" of the arteries with cholesterol plaques by blocking the work of TLR4 with the help of the protein AIBP (ApoA-I binding protein), responsible for the transport of fats in the bloodstream.
These experiments unexpectedly showed that large amounts of AIBP not only prevented the formation of cholesterol plaques, but also significantly reduced the intensity of inflammation and muffled pain in rodents on which scientists tested this drug for atherosclerosis.
Having discovered such an unusual property of the protein, Miller contacted Yaksham and biologists conducted a new series of experiments on mice that had recently undergone chemotherapy after the removal of a cancerous tumor.
As these experiments have shown, only one injection of AIBP suppressed the pain generated by anti-cancer drugs for at least two months, without causing dependence and other side effects. The behavior of such rodents, as scientists emphasize, did not differ in any way from how their healthy relatives behaved.
"Now we are working on creating technologies that would allow us to inject AIBP into the body constantly, without forcing the patient to go to the hospital for injections. On the other hand, most of them will go there anyway, so as not to suffer constant pain. If everything ends well, AIBP will make morphine and opiates completely unnecessary in medicine, which will reduce their role in society," Miller concludes.
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