Techniques now being developed at the University of Queensland could bring pain relief to millions of people worldwide.
Studies are underway at the School of Pharmacy where Dr Maree Smith, a specialist in pain research and pain management, is researching ways of treating severe pain.
Dr Smith said some types of severe pain were only poorly controlled by many classes of drugs including morphine, the traditional palliative for such cases, which itself may become less effective over time.
"About 10 percent of patients with moderate to severe pain, particularly people suffering complaints involving nerve damage, may be poorly responsive to traditional medicines," she said.
"The western world spends about $1 billion a year on pain relief medicines. Ten percent of that is $100 million annually, so it's a huge market."
Dr Smith's research has gained more than $1 million funding since 1990. The studies are being conducted by a team of 10, including postdoctoral researchers Dr Peter Cabot and Dr Fraser Ross.
Dr Smith said the brain and spinal cord, working either together or independently, could block pain. Recent research was looking at the importance of each area in pain transmission and if there were any side effects on other functions when pain was blocked.
Dr Smith said they were interested in the extent to which it was possible to modulate a neuro-transmitter called "Substance P", which is known to be an important transmitter of pain messages.
Also in the School of Pharmacy, Dr Greg Monteith conducts research into the behaviour of neurones, brain cells specialised to transmit electrical nerve impulses.
He said this work may find new ways to treat stroke victims, those with Alzheimer's disease and others suffering severe pain.
Dr Monteith has been working in the United States for the past two years, at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and is applying techniques he learned and refined there to his work at the University of Queensland.
He is culturing brain cells in the laboratory and studying synaptic transmission, the way in which nerve impulses cross the minute gap from one neurone to the next, thus allowing the cells to "talk to each other".
"I am also interested in how an enzyme contained in each cell removes calcium and whether a change in this enzyme's activity may be important in cardiovascular disease and cancer," Dr Monteith said.
"In Baltimore we used novel microscope techniques to measure calcium in very small areas of a cell. This has allowed us, for the first time, to see changes in calcium at high speeds in specialised compartments which are important in energy production and cell death.
"It's like being able to look inside individual rooms of a house instead of just being able to look at the whole house from the outside with the front door shut.
"These techniques will greatly help us understand how cells work and what may go wrong in disease," he said.
For further information, contact Dr Maree Smith (telephone 3365 2554) or Dr Greg Monteith (telephone 3365 7442).
