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Kohane speculates that surfactant made the anesthetic better able to penetrate sensory nerves, which have little or none of the fatty coating known as myelin, whereas in motor neurons, which have abundant myelin, the active drug gets trapped in the myelin, never entering the nerve itself.
The lab's next steps will be to explore the effects of different permeability enhancers and examine their safety, since at high doses the drug combination could potentially be toxic to the nerves. The eventual plan is to test the approach in larger animals.
A parallel approach to achieving a pain-specific nerve block was proposed in 2007 by Clifford Woolf, MD, PhD, recently appointed director of the Children's Hospital Boston Program in Neurobiology. Woolf’s team combined QXT-314 with capsaicin, which opens cellular gates that are only present in sensory neurons, and achieved pain-specific blocks in rats lasting 2 hours or more.
The new study was funded by the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences. Itay Sagie, a research associate at the LBDD was the paper’s first author. For licensing information, click here
Citation: Sagie I and Kohane D. Prolonged sensory-selective nerve blockade. PNAS online early edition, week of February 1, 2010.
Contact:
Erin McColgan
617-919-3110
erin.mccolgan@childrens.harvard.edu
Children's Hospital Boston is home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. More than 500 scientists, including eight members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 members of the Institute of Medicine and 13 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Children's Hospital Boston today is a 397-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care grounded in the values of excellence in patient care and sensitivity to the complex needs and diversity of children and families. Children's also is the primary pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. For more information about the hospital and its research visit: www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom.
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