Gene Therapy for Chronic Pain: How to Manipulate and Unravel Pain Control Circuits from the Brain?

The increasing prevalence of chronic pain imposes to search for new therapeutic approaches. Despite the increase in basic and clinical pain research during the last decades, the available analgesic drugs remained considerably unchanged. Gene therapy emerged as an important tool in the pain field. Studies in experimental pain models consisted on blockade of nociceptive transmission at the spinal cord by peripheral delivery of viral vectors (mainly replication-defective forms of herpes simplex virus type 1, HSV-1). Based on these results, clinical trials using gene therapy were successfully implemented in cancer patients with intractable pain.

Source: Springer protocols feed by Neuroscience - January 10, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news