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Pain is a symptom of  many different illnesses which makes it very difficult to treat as it has many difference causes.

There are currently many different pain killers (or analgesics as they are also known) available. Some don’t work very well and some have some quite nasty side effects. The company I work for is trying to find a completely new way of treating pain, hopefully without the side effects.

Pain messages are sent back to your brain, from the area affected by pain, through nerve fibres. There are lots of nerve fibres in your body sending messages back and forth to the brain, telling your body to do stuff (move, breath, heartbeat, digestion etc) and receiving information about what is around you (from eyes, ears, skin etc). Messages are sent along nerve fibres by something called an action potential (which is just a special name for a small change in voltage that moves along the nerve fibre  – a bit like a mexican wave – caused by changes in the concentration of ions (Na+, K+, Cl- mostly) in the cells that make up the nerve fibre. These changes in ion concentrations are caused by channels in the cell membranes opening and closing – known as Ion Channels.

In the nerve fibres that take pain messages back to the brain there are particular ion channels involved and we are trying to design new drugs which will block just these channels and therefore hopefully block the pain signals back to the brain.

This is done by firstly a team of chemists designing and making lots of new chemicals which they think will fit into and therefore block the ion channel. The biologists then take over. We have special cells which have been genetically engineered to contain the ion channel we are interested in. By a technique called electrophysiology we can measure the activity (opening and closing) of this ion channel and see if these new chemicals block it (stop it from working) and by how much. We can then tell the chemists “this drug worked really well” or “this one was not so good” and they can look at the structure of the drug (the shape of the chemical) and how well it worked and try and change the design to make it work better. So it continues until we have the best drug that we can find. It then has to have loads of other testing done on it to make sure it is safe before finally it will be tested on people that are in pain eg back pain to see if it works.

The cells that we use for testing the drugs have to looked ater which takes up a couple of hours on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I run the experiments to test the new drugs 2 days a week. I’m currently setting a new drug testing experiment as well. Working for a small company there are lots of things that we have to do ourselves, so I also get involved with managing the lab, which can be ordering stuff, setting up a new storage system, doing safety assessments and designing modifications to our lab notebook software to name just a few. There is a great deal of flexibility about what you do when, which I love.