Not Just Neurons: Pain Is Orchestrated in Partnership with Many Non-neuronal Cells
Abstract
Pain is a symptom common to a wide variety of conditions and one that severely impacts an individual's everyday life, as well as having broader socioeconomic repercussions. In recent years, there has been spectacularly rapid progress in the understanding of the molecular basis of sensory neuron function and pain in preclinical models. However, the number of analgesics interacting with novel targets that have received regulatory approval in recent years has been limited. Examples include monoclonal antibody and small molecule therapies disrupting calcitonin gene-related peptide signaling for treating migraine and, most recently, suzetrigine, a small molecular inhibitor of the voltage-gated sodium channel Na V 1.8 subunit. In this review, we step away from focusing on the sensory neuron as the transmitter of nociceptive information and examine the role of non-neuronal cells in modulating sensory neuron activity. One potential appeal of disrupting the activity of peripherally located non-neuronal cells is the likely bypassing of side effects associated with modulating a target receptor that is expressed by neurons within both the peripheral and central nervous systems, although targeting of peripheral, non-neuronal cells will not of course necessarily be side effect-free. Here, we examine the key roles of non-neuronal cells in orchestrating pain across a diverse set of conditions, from joint pain to bone pain, chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain, Fabry disease, and chronic…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Noninvasive and Point-of-Care Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS)-Based Breathalyzer for Mass Screening of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) under 5 min
- De Novo Transcriptome Analysis and Detection of Antimicrobial Peptides of the American Cockroach Periplaneta americana (Linnaeus)
- Molecular Characterization and Expression Profiling of Tomato GRF Transcription Factor Family Genes in Response to Abiotic Stresses and Phytohormones
- Assembly of Tight Junction Strands: Claudin-10b and Claudin-3 Form Homo Tetrameric Building Blocks that Polymerise in a Channel-Independent Manner
- Update of the Pompe variant database for the prediction of clinical phenotypes: Novel disease‐associated variants, common sequence variants, and results from newborn screening
- Machine Learning-Based SERS Chemical Space for Two-Way Prediction of Structures and Spectra of Untrained Molecules
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.