Grant: Operating Grant

Chronic pain can be a debilitating condition for which there are currently few treatment options, leading to a major burden on our Health care system and the Canadian economy due to lost productivity. We have discovered a previously unrecognized mechanism that contributes to the development of chronic pain states. Upon initiation of a painful stimulus, electrical signals travel along specific nerve cells from the site of the injury to the spinal cord where they communicate with another set of nerve cells that connect to the brain where pain is perceived as an unpleasant sensation. These electrical impulses depend on ion channels, and among these are a group of proteins called T-type calcium channels. When these T-type calcium channels are too active, or if there are too many present in the nerve cells, there is increased pain signalling, and this is exactly what appears to happen in chronic pain conditions. We have discovered how this occurs at the molecular level and we will now build on our exciting preliminary data to learn more about what precisely leads to the greater numbers of T-type calcium channels. We will then use this information to design new ways to interfere with this process, and apply this information to treat pain in mice. We hope that this will ultimately lead to new drug molecules that can be used to treat pain in the human population. This in turn will have a major benefit to society.