Anthrax, a toxin known to have been used as a terrorist weapon, could be used to relieve pain in animals.
Anthrax, a toxin world famous for causing serious lung infections in humans and for having been used as a terrorist weapon, could be used to relieve pain in animals.
A study led by researchers at Harvard University and published this Monday in Nature Neuroscience concludes that the dreaded microbe has a toxin that can ‘silence’ multiple types of pain in animals.
According to the research, this toxin alters signaling in neurons that detect pain and, when selectively administered to the cells of the central and peripheral nervous system, it is capable of suppressing pain.
The authors combined parts of the anthrax toxin with different types of molecular load and delivered it to pain-sensing neurons.
“This molecular platform, which consists of using a bacterial toxin to introduce substances into neurons and modulate their function, represents a new way of targeting pain mediating neurons”Says the study’s principal investigator, Isaac Chiu of Harvard.
Useful for designing new treatments
The technique can be used to design new pain treatments to act precisely on pain receptors and without affecting the rest of the body as other drugs do like opioids, which, while the most effective pain relievers on the market, have powerful side effects and are addictive.
There is still a great clinical need to develop non-opioid pain therapies “That are not addictive but that are effective to silence the pain”explains the study’s first author, Nicole Yang, a Harvard researcher.
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“Our experiments show that a strategy, at least experimentally, could specifically target pain neurons with this bacterial toxin,” although the technique has yet to be tested and refined in further studies with animals and, eventually, in humans, says the researcher. .
To do the study, the authors attempted to determine how pain-sensing neurons differ from other neurons in the human body and they found that pain fibers have receptors for anthrax toxins, while other types of neurons do not.
That is, the pain fibers are structurally prepared to interact with the anthrax bacteria.
From there, they carried out a series of experiments in which, among other things, found that the anthrax toxin altered the signaling of human nerve cells in plates, and also in live animals.
By injecting the toxin into the lower spine of the mice, they were able to block pain without altering vital signs, such as heart rate, body temperature and motor coordination of animals.
Thus, they demonstrated that this technique is very selective and precise in targeting pain fibers and blocking pain without generalized systemic effects.
Effective for other types of pain
In addition, injecting the anthrax toxin into the mice alleviated the symptoms of two other types of pain: andl caused by inflammation and caused by nerve cell damage as in traumatic injuries and certain viral infections such as shingles, or diabetes and cancer treatments.
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They also observed that as the pain lessened, lThe treated nerve cells remained physiologically intact, which indicates that the pain-blocking effects were not due to an injury to the nerve cells, but were derived from the alteration of the signaling within them.
Finally, the team designed a carrier vehicle from anthrax proteins and used it to deliver other pain relieving substances to nerve cells such as botulinum toxin, another potentially lethal bacteria known for its ability to alter nerve signaling. This method also blocked pain in the mice.
The study concludes that these experiments have shown that this could be a novel delivery system to combat pain. (I)
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