We’ve all experienced pain. But dealing with chronic pain day in and day out for years on end affects every aspect of your life…your work, your mood, your sleep.
Chronic pain affects a staggering 1 in 4 people worldwide, but there is still no reliable treatment. Opioids, commonly prescribed for pain conditions, give inconsistent and often inadequate relief of symptoms, and can lead to serious side-effects, addiction, and overdose.
Nerve stimulators are available as an alternative to medication. Placed on the spinal cord or peripheral nerves, they use electricity to mask pain signals. While they can be effective, for many people, they fail to provide long-term benefits.
One reason for this is that it is extremely difficult to give enough stimulation using electricity to relieve pain without causing unwanted activation of other nerve fibres.
Bionics Institute researcher Professor Rachael Richardson and her team are investigating a potential treatment that combines the benefits of electrical stimulation with a novel, highly precise stimulus based on light that can be applied directly to the affected nerve. The combination of electrical and optical stimuli is called hybrid stimulation.
Our aim is to develop a hybrid stimulation device that suppresses pain with greater precision than pain medications and allows greater masking of pain than electrical-only nerve stimulators, transforming the lives of people with chronic pain. Prof Rachael Richardson
In their natural state, nerves cannot be stimulated by visible light, but Prof Richardson is a world leader in an emerging technology called optogenetics that uses a genetic modification in specific nerve fibres to make them sensitive to light.
The benefit of stimulating the nerve with light is that only the modified nerve fibres are activated while the other nerve fibres are completely unaffected, making the potential hybrid stimulation treatment much more precise.
In the context of pain, the highly precise neural signals generated by this potential hybrid stimulation therapy are processed in the spine, effectively giving pain signals a red stop light, while all the other neural activity have a green light, ensuring normal movement and sensation.
Prof Richardson’s team have had some excellent results from early research into this method and are now progressing this research to the next stage, which includes a plan to:
- Measure the effectiveness of hybrid stimulation on varying levels of chronic pain
- Develop clinically relevant tools to modify the affected nerves locally so they respond to light
- Engineer a nerve stimulator that can apply light directly to the nerve
- Perform safety studies with the aim of progressing the therapy to clinical trials.