New insights into pain relief drugs

Scientists from the Research School of Biology have opened the door to a new world of pain treatments with their discovery of the exact way that pain relief drugs, such as anaesthetics, work on the body. Dr Ben Corry and Lewis Martin developed a detailed computer model that revealed for the first time how benzocaine, a local anaesthetic, and phenytoin, an anti-epilepsy drug, enter into nerve cells and prevent the pain signals being transmitted to the brain. "By understanding how the current range of drugs work we can best design the next generation, to better treat conditions such as chronic pain, epilepsy and cardiac arrhythmia," said Dr Corry. The precise knowledge of how the drug molecules attach to proteins in the nerve cell give a springboard for redesigning drugs without the side-effects that current drugs bring with them. Their work, from the Research School of Biology at ANU is published in the latest edition of PLOS Computational Biology. Local anaesthetics were first inspired by cocaine and have been in use for more than 100 years, but the exact mechanism has not been understood until now. The pair used more than three million CPU hours on the National Computational Infrastructure's supercomputer to simulate the drug's route into the nerve cell.