Scientists say studying people like Steven Pete, who has a rare disorder that renders him insensitive to pain, may lead to nonaddictive painkillers.
NBC News said:All sorts of strategies have been offered up as ways to stem the nation's opioid crisis, from new drug warning labels to new laws aimed at making it hard for patients to get multiple prescriptions for the powerful — and powerfully addictive — drugs.
But opioid overdoses continue at a tragic pace; each day, they claim the lives of about 78 Americans. The crisis is fueled in part when people suffering from chronic pain turn to opioids in an effort to curb their often debilitating discomfort.
Scientists have been working to develop painkilling medications that work as effectively as opioids without carrying the risk of addiction. Unfortunately, these efforts have met with little success. But ironically, new research on a rare genetic condition known as chronic insensitivity to pain, or CIP, could soon lead to the development of such drugs.
No Pain May Bring Big Gain
Just a few hundred people around the world suffer from CIP. One is Steven Pete, a 36-year-old drug dependency counselor in Kelso, Washington. Like others with the disorder, Pete is impervious to pain of all kinds. Cut a finger? Touch a hot stove? Pete doesn’t feel a thing.
Pete was diagnosed with CIP when he was just a few months old. “I was teething, and I ended up chewing a good portion of the tip of my tongue off,” he recalls. “My parents rushed me to a pediatrician, and he held a lighter to the bottom of my foot. I didn’t show any response, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty certain this is what he’s got.’”
As a child, Pete broke bones more times than he can remember, often when he tried dangerous stunts to impress his peers. His left knee is now so badly damaged that he faces the prospect of having his left leg amputated.
“CIP is such a rare condition, partly because very few individuals who have it reach adulthood,” says Dr. Ingo Kurth, who studies the condition at the Institute of Human Genetics in Aachen, Germany. “Many end up killing themselves because they don’t understand what constitutes a harmful situation.”
For the better part of three decades, Pete had little idea of the precise defect in his DNA that caused him to have CIP. But in 2012, he was contacted by a small biotech company in Canada. Xenon Pharmaceuticals was using Facebook to track down people with CIP in order to sequence their DNA through saliva samples. Pete obliged, and he — like many others with CIP — was found to have a mutation in a particular gene known as SCNP9A.
The finding suggests that it may be possible to develop painkillers that work not by mimicking the body's natural pain-killing endorphins — as opioids do — but by blocking the transmission of pain signals within the body.
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