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Pain is defined as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage" (International Association for the Study of Pain). Chronic pain can be caused by a wide variety of conditions and has been estimated to affect up to 40% of the adult population. Currently available drugs for human chronic pain treatment provide partial relief for one out of five patients. This makes chronic pain a challenging research field to identify novel therapeutic mechanisms.
Axxam is addressing the discovery of new therapeutic targets for chronic
pain by gene expression profiling in healthy human tissues and animal models.
Dorsal root ganglia (DRG) and the dorsal horn of the spinal cord (DH) play important roles in conveying nociceptive information from periphery by primary afferent neurons. We have, therefore, carefully collected these important tissues and established a program of target selection for the identification of DRG- and DH-enriched genes by microarray analysis in human tissues and through quantitative gene-by-gene evaluation of expression perturbation in rat models of neuropathic pain. |
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