This Research Topic is part of a series with:
New Perspectives in Developing Safer Analgesics - Volume IIThe epidemiology of pain is now well defined and there is a gap between the current state of the pharmacopoeia and a public health need for better analgesics for many pain syndromes. The increasingly questionable benefit/risk ratio of several classes of analgesics currently on the market highlights the need for identifying analgesic strategies that are safe, effective and devoid of side effects.
Our goal is to set a forum for Original Research (preclinical, clinical, and translational) and Review Articles focused on identifying therapeutic strategies for pain that lack side effects of conventional analgesics. Studies on the following topics are welcome:
- Opioid use disorders: epidemiology, mechanisms and medication treatment
- Molecular, cellular and tissue mechanisms of analgesic opioid action, including epigenetic modifications and their consequential changes to gene expression
- Emerging opioid- and non-opioid-based strategies to achieve effective pain relief and improved side effect profiles. Interventions include pH-dependent ligands, biased agonism, peripheral analgesic mechanisms, heteromers or multiple receptors, splice variants, endogenous analgesic transmitters and enzymes catalyzing their deactivation, allosteric modulators, anti-opioid systems, protein-protein interactions, downstream effectors of analgesic receptors
- New cell/tissue/animal models to study analgesic action
- New biophysical approaches to give a deep molecular analysis of analgesic receptors
- Non-pharmacological strategies to suppress pain and/or limit opioid abuse and misuse
- Historical overview of any of the above
This Research Topic is part of a series with:
New Perspectives in Developing Safer Analgesics - Volume IIThe epidemiology of pain is now well defined and there is a gap between the current state of the pharmacopoeia and a public health need for better analgesics for many pain syndromes. The increasingly questionable benefit/risk ratio of several classes of analgesics currently on the market highlights the need for identifying analgesic strategies that are safe, effective and devoid of side effects.
Our goal is to set a forum for Original Research (preclinical, clinical, and translational) and Review Articles focused on identifying therapeutic strategies for pain that lack side effects of conventional analgesics. Studies on the following topics are welcome:
- Opioid use disorders: epidemiology, mechanisms and medication treatment
- Molecular, cellular and tissue mechanisms of analgesic opioid action, including epigenetic modifications and their consequential changes to gene expression
- Emerging opioid- and non-opioid-based strategies to achieve effective pain relief and improved side effect profiles. Interventions include pH-dependent ligands, biased agonism, peripheral analgesic mechanisms, heteromers or multiple receptors, splice variants, endogenous analgesic transmitters and enzymes catalyzing their deactivation, allosteric modulators, anti-opioid systems, protein-protein interactions, downstream effectors of analgesic receptors
- New cell/tissue/animal models to study analgesic action
- New biophysical approaches to give a deep molecular analysis of analgesic receptors
- Non-pharmacological strategies to suppress pain and/or limit opioid abuse and misuse
- Historical overview of any of the above
