Targeting Sodium Channels for Pain Relief

The race to develop analgesic drugs that inhibit sodium channel NaV1.7 is revealing a complex sensory role for the protein.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 12 min read

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Neurobiologist John Wood has long been interested in how animals feel pain. His research at University College London (UCL) typically involved knocking out various ion channels important in sensory neuronal function from mouse models and observing the effects. But in the mid-2000s, a peculiar story about a boy in Pakistan opened up a new, and particularly human-centric, research path.

The story was relayed by Geoff Woods, a University of Cambridge geneticist. “Geoff had been wandering round Pakistan looking for consanguineous families that had genes contributing to microcephaly,” Wood recalls. During his time there, “somebody came to see him and said that there was a child in the marketplace who was damaging himself for the tourists—and was apparently pain-free.” The boy would regularly stick knives through ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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