A group of researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Burke Neurological Institute has made an exciting breakthrough that could bring new hope to people living with chronic nerve pain. They’ve developed a new drug that, in early tests on rats, reduced pain effectively—without the dangerous side effects of opioids or other common medications.
Chronic nerve pain, also called neuropathic pain, affects millions of people around the world. It happens when nerves outside the brain and spinal cord become damaged. This kind of pain can feel sharp, burning, or like pins and needles. It’s often long-lasting and very difficult to treat.
Doctors usually prescribe medications like gabapentin (a seizure medicine) or duloxetine (an antidepressant). These drugs can help, but they don’t work well for everyone and can cause problems like dizziness, drowsiness, or nausea.
Opioid painkillers are also sometimes used, but they come with major risks—such as addiction, tolerance, and overdose. Worse still, opioids often don’t relieve nerve pain very effectively.
The new drug being developed offers a different approach. Instead of numbing the whole nervous system or blocking pain signals broadly, it targets a specific problem inside the nerve cells themselves.
The research team discovered that in chronic nerve pain, certain nerve cells become too active due to proteins called HCN ion channels. These channels let electrical signals flow through the cells, and when they are overactive, they send too many pain signals to the brain.
The challenge is that these same channels are also found in the heart and brain. Blocking them in the wrong places could lead to serious side effects, like heart rhythm problems or drowsiness. So the key was to find a way to target just the pain-related channels—without affecting the rest of the body.
Dr. Gareth Tibbs, the study’s lead author, created a drug called BP4L-18:1:1. He started with propofol, a commonly used anesthetic, and made an important change: he added a special “anchor” molecule. This anchor helps the drug stay in the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord, avoiding unwanted side effects.
You can think of the anchor like tying a boat to a dock—it helps keep the boat in place. In the same way, the anchor helps the drug stay where it’s needed and out of places where it could cause harm.
Once in place, the rest of the drug goes to work calming the overactive HCN channels. In animal tests, this helped reduce pain without causing sleepiness, heart problems, or other serious side effects.
The researchers were able to give the drug orally to rats, meaning it could one day be available in pill form. Most importantly, the drug worked well and didn’t seem to cause harm. That’s a big deal for people who are currently stuck choosing between ineffective medications and potentially dangerous ones.
“This new drug has the potential to change how we treat chronic nerve pain,” said Dr. Steven Fox, founder of Akelos, the company helping move the drug toward real-world use. “It targets the root cause of pain without the usual side effects.”
The work was supported by the Daedalus Fund for Innovation, which helps early-stage research move from the lab to practical use.
The research team hopes to begin human clinical trials if further testing continues to show promise. If successful, the drug could offer safe, effective relief for people who have run out of options.
For now, it’s a sign of hope—hope that chronic nerve pain may no longer be a condition people simply have to live with. A safer, better treatment may be on the way.
If you care about pain, please read studies about how to manage gout with a low-purine diet, and a guide to eating right for arthritis.
For more health information, please see recent studies about the link between processed foods and chronic diseases, and avoid these 8 foods to ease arthritis pain.
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